How to Find and Hire Good Content Providers
Published February 14, 2010 - RSS/XML Feed RSS
 
Everyone knows how important fresh and relevant content is for their website’s SEO. However, most online business owners are busy with marketing, product creation, business planning and website maintenance and have little time to spend creating fresh content for their site.  In addition, article marketing and content delivery is also important for building back links and creating an online presence. Therefore, it’s important to have a dependable and consistent method for creating fresh content. This article contains specific instructions on how you can find and hire good content providers for taking care of your need for fresh content.

Where Can You Find Content Providers?

Content providers such as article writers, freelance copywriters, editors and academic writers can be found on bidding sites which connect freelancers with business owners. Some of the most popular bidding sites for finding freelancers are www.elance.com, www.guru.com, and www.getfreelancer.com. These sites only require a small fee in order to set up an account and you can post requests for article writers and sales writers to bid on writing projects which you require to have completed. However, it’s important to know that not all of the content providers on these sites are of equal talent and capability. Therefore, it’s important to know how to screen out the best writers so that you get the most value for your money…

Five Rules for Hiring Content Providers

       1.       Avoid Hiring “Cheap”
 
Everyone likes to save money and part of hiring good help is to get as much work done for as little money as possible. If you’re looking for good writers and you decide to hire the lowest bidder, it will often cost you a LOT more money in the long run. If the writing which is provided is subpar or if it requires you to make multiple revisions, then you may not end up saving yourself a lot of time in outsourcing your content creation. Also, even if the writer you are working with is very good, the amount of money they agree to work for will determine the amount of time they are able to devote to working on your content.

This means that agreeing to hire someone for a very low rate such as one or two dollars per one hundred words is taking a risk at having subpar writing created for your website. As a general rule for hiring good article writers, it’s best to pay your writers no less than $10 per article for articles of 500 words or less. However, when it comes to creating high quality content for your web pages, it’s wiser to pay $20 to $50 for 500 to 1000 words.

       2.       Look for Great Communication Skills
 
Great communication skills are essential when it comes to finding content providers for your online business. No matter how good a writers is, they need to be able to understand your requirements in order to create the kind of content you are looking for. When you first begin to communicate with potential content providers, send them a list of questions about the process which they use to create content and to meet deadlines. A good communicator will respond to all of your questions or at least ask for clarification on the questions which they don’t understand. It’s also important to set up a small project of about five articles in order to test them out and see if they understand the project well enough to meet your deadline and to create the kind of content which you are looking for. You can even select more than one content provider for the first project so that you can narrow down your options to the best provider.

       3.       Take Care of Your Content Providers
 
Good content providers are not easy to find so it’s a good idea to take care of your writers when you find them. Set up weekly or monthly projects and pay your writers as soon as the content is delivered to you.  It’s also important to make sure that you respond your writers within 24 hours when they have a question or a concern about your project. This way your writers will always have the information that they need to keep current on your project and meet your deadlines. It’s also important to let your writers do their job and not to micromanage them or nitpick at their work. If you follow these guidelines, your writers will be happy and they will want to continue to write for you.

       4.       Use More Than One Writer
 
No matter how capable or dependable your writer is, there is always the possibility that you’ll need additional content created which they cannot provide for you because of short notice or time constraints with other projects. This is why it’s a good idea to either work with a content company or to have multiple content providers which you can call on when you need them. Having more than one content provider available will give you a backup plan if something happens with one of your providers. It will also give you the flexibility to have occasional additional writing projects completed without having hold ups in your regular projects.

       5.       Develop a System for Hiring and Training Writers
 
As you are hiring and training your first few writers, take the opportunity to develop a collection of written instructions which you can give to your writers in the future. As you work with your writers, continue to develop and refine these instructions so that you can use them for hiring and training future writers. You never know when one of your writers may be unavailable or when you might need to hire additional writers. When this time comes, having a collection of written instructions will save you a lot of time and frustration in brining your new writers up to speed. Written instructions will also give you the flexibility to have your existing writers train new writers so that you can focus on building and managing your business.

Conclusion

Follow these guidelines when hiring content providers and you’ll have a much easier time keeping fresh content on your website and for content delivery purposes. If you do, you will save yourself a lot of time and creative energy and be able to focus on managing your business and creating quality products and marketing plans.

Resource Links

The following are sites where you can locate and hire writing experts. These have been listed in the order of quality:

www.elance.com

www.guru.com

www.getafreelancer.com

Link to Skype communications software (for communicating with providers in other countries)

www.skype.com

Legitimate escrow service site (for paying writers who you connect with outside of standard bidding sites

www.escrow.com

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