What Should You Pay a Content Writer?
Content writers charge anything from $1 – $250 or more for one 600 word article so it can be somewhat confusing to decide how much you should pay. What you should pay a content writer really comes down to the quality of the content and the level of service you require.
Just like every other profession, when it comes to content writers, there are good ones, average ones and awful ones. If you scour the Internet for the lowest rates possible, it’s obvious which group of content writers will be most likely to accept your work. The good content writers will simply not undertake work at those rates – nor will the average ones for that matter. They don’t have to – they’re busy working for the website owners, SEM and SEO firms who understand the importance of quality content and the value of professional and reliable writers.
If you take a quick look at the websites that broker freelance writing work, you’ll notice that a large percentage of the writing jobs posted are offering abysmal rates – some as low as $1-2 per article. There are plenty of “writers” bidding on those jobs. What you won’t see very often is a professional marketing firm requiring volume content or a webmaster that operates websites of a professional nature looking for a professional writer on those sites. There’s a reason for that.
Content writing jobs come in a range of sizes – from a handful of blog postings or articles for an individual website owner, to job lots of hundreds of articles or postings each and every week for large marketing firms. For an individual webmaster, receiving a few articles of poor quality and having to re-write them is somewhat of an inconvenience – but consider the position of a firm that requires 200 articles each and every week. The company is outsourcing because they don’t have the time to write those 200 articles and because writing is not their core profession. When a firm receives a batch of 200 poorly written articles they must –
- read every item closely to identify errors;
- re-write or edit them in-house or
- find someone to re-write or edit and
- pay them to re-write or edit;
- explain the delay to their clients; and
- find another content writing service.
Hiring cheap content writers ends up costing far more than if the firm had paid higher rates for professional writers in the beginning. The time marketing personnel spend reading and correcting articles can be substantial – the process will take longer than it took the cheap writers to complete the articles. The hours spent doing this is time lost working on what they are good at. The marketing firm also risks losing their client as a client has no interest in errors made or delays caused by contractors – they are paying the firm they have engaged. Experienced marketing personnel have learned this and they bypass the cheap content writers without a second thought.
Likewise, firms that market for professional businesses seek quality writers. They know that anything less than grammatically correct and well written content will simply not be accepted by their clients. They wish to retain their good clients and as the cost of the content is billed to the clients, there is simply no need for the firm to use cheap writing services. Hence marketing firms with bulk writing requirements and webmasters of professional websites tend to seek out professional content writers or writing services.
Don’t despair – you won’t have to pay $250 to get a good quality article. There are many writing services that charge much less that $250 for an individual article and around $25-50 per article for large quantities, depending on the volume and regularity of the work. If you’re counting the pennies, consider this – professionally written content can give you a good long term return on your investment. Spending $500-5000 on professional writers is likely to bring quality traffic to your site and increase your sales – whereas having poorly written content is likely to give your visitors the impression your entire business is as “dodgy” as your content writers.
