How to find the best writer for your website or blog

How to find the best writer for your website or blog

When you get to the point in your company where you can hire writers to come in and produce content for you, you will want to hire the perfect writer that will get the job done.  Now, you can hire writers fairly easily, but that doesn't mean they will all be the best for you and your business.  Sure, you could spend $5 on a 500 word article, but that usually means you're not getting the best possible content and you'll likely need to edit a decent amount of it due to all the grammar errors.  Also, there are a lot of $5 writers out there who just spin content, meaning they take 10 articles and add them into a piece of spinning software that will spit out a "unique" article for them to use, or sell.

I've been writing plenty of content for myself and my clients over the years, but I'm always on the lookout for a great writer that can help me out so I can focus on other tasks such as email marketing, PPC management, web design, client relations, etc.

So you'll need to know a few things before you can hire the perfect writer, and those are:


Know what you need before looking for a writer
When you start looking for a writer, you'll need to know exactly what you'll be needing them to do.  Sure, you might think I'm crazy for saying that because writers just write what they are paid for, but that's not always the case.  The majority of us need articles written up for marketing purposes or to publish on our blogs, but there are also writers out there that will do product descriptions, emails, press releases, etc. 

You can go at this one of two ways, you can either hire someone to write your content and pay them per piece or you can get a regular contributor to your blog who will likely write for free in exchange for a backlink or some recognition.  Sometimes you will have to pay a contributor, but it's usually less than a ghostwriter who just sells you the content and you post it yourself.  I've worked with both of these methods and think each of them has their own benefits.

Benefits of purchasing content

• You don't have to link back to a writers website.
• You are the one publishing the content, and getting credit for it, not the person actually writing the content.
• You can set deadlines of how much content you need and how quickly it should be done.

Benefits of hiring a contributor to write for you

• You usually won't have to pay for your content
• If you do have to pay for content, it's usually much cheaper than paying a ghost writer
• Your blog or website will look like it has a team behind it, writing up content

You'll likely want to start off hiring a ghost writer, paying for your content, before you start your search for a contributor because it's much easier to find a good ghost writer.  It's easier to find a ghost writer because there are much more of them out there compared to contributors.  This is because the majority of people want to get paid for their work, not write for you without any sort of compensation or even a fraction of what they could be making.  Don't let that discourage you, you can find a few good contributors over time, but it's much more difficult to do so I always recommend people find a good ghost writer first and then searching for a contributor



Finding the best writers for you
When it comes to finding content writers, you actually have a lot of options on your plate which you can choose from.  Some of the options aren't that great while others are much better, but the better the writer you hire, the more it will likely cost you.  Remember, quality content will cost more than something that was spun by someone who doesn't know how to actually write content lol.  For this reason, I will ALWAYS avoid $5 article writers because I've never actually had a good experience with one haha.

So, where can you actually find content writers?

1. Craigslist:  This isn't my favorite way to find writers, but it's something that has worked in the past and that's the only reason it's making the list lol.  You simply go post on Craigslist and say you're looking for a content writer who can produce XX articles each week for $XX per article.  You'll always get a flood of responses if you put a money symbol in the title, so try that out and see who bites   In order to filter out the people who are just trying to do a money grab (applying for anything that pays, without actually knowing what they're doing) you can put in something like "You will need to submit at least 1 unique article on a topic of my choosing, so I can see if you actually know what you're doing".  Good writers won't have a problem doing this, because they know that a decent article doesn't take long to write and if you're actually serious about the work, you will likely choose them.  The bad writers, or the people who are just grabbing at money, will either avoid your job listing or they will submit something that was just copy and then pasted into the response box when they contact you.  This is why you'll need to run a duplicate content check on everything that you get as a submission
2. Content Writer Platforms:  There are actually a decent amount of these, but I prefer going to https://www.wordclerks.com since it's owned by ionicware and I don't have to register a new account lol   There I can simply search for a writer based on what they actually do and even filter out the writers based on user level and then manually filter out the ones I don't like lol.  The system over at WordClerks is just like SEOclerks (duh Razzy!) and it's pretty easy to find anything you need
3. Forums:  A lot of forums will have content writers posting their own services in specific sections, so they can make money of course.  They usually post their reviews near the bottom of their sales thread, if they know what they're doing, and you can also search through the entire thread to see what people are saying about the service.  You'll need to make an educated decision on this one, most of the initial reviews will be from people who were given free content in exchange for positive words.

Pay them and see what they produce
You never know what the best method for you will be, so I would recommend using multiple angles and hiring different types of writers in order to see who produces the best content for you.  If you don't have a moderate budget, you'll need to be very selective when hiring a writer, but that's not a big problem because you can filter out all the new services and writers with 0 sales simply by using SEOclerks and WordClerks  

If you don't get specific on what you need done, you won't get exactly what you wanted out of the writers.  I would suggest writing down what you need, and then leaving it for a day while brainstorming about your writing needs throughout the day.  Come back to the file of what you need done, and add in more content all while editing it at the same time.  You never want to just put together a sales thread, on a whim, and pay random writers for their work.  You will need to filter out the bad writers with your sales pitch in order to only work with the cream of the crop lol.

You'll basically be doing split testing, but with human beings, and filtering out the low performing content writers while keeping the best ones on your roster.  It sounds pretty odd, but you won't want to keep the people who are generating spun content or the ones who are submitting content that is riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes



After you've narrowed down the field to a few writers, you'll want to favorite them or bookmark their websites in order to keep coming back.  The good writers will be worth the money because you'll never have to waste time editing the content that was submitted, you can simply take the content that was produced for you and add it to your blog without having to edit anything.  Also, good writers will take more than an hour to produce something because they will likely do some research prior to starting the content, so don't bug them with a bunch of comments like "When will my content be finished?" lol.




In Conclusion:
Using this article to find the best writer for your website is something I would highly recommend.  I say that because I write a lot of my own content, as well as a lot of content for my clients, and this is the same process I use to find great writers when I need them to come in and do some work for my websites when I'm bogged down with clients work   I know it works, because I've used it, but it does take a few tries to find the best writer for you.  You can always use SEOclerks.com and WordClerks.com to filter out writers based on levels, but you could actually be missing out on a lot of great writers, so just look through their reviews and see what people are saying, then favorite them and start filtering afterward so you don't miss much



Remember to follow me!
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Thanks!

Razzy