Client Can't Write His Own Articles
-
Hello,
I'm helping a client put together an FAQ and 5 thorough, graphically stimulating, articles.
The client can easily write his FAQ articles.
However, he's not knowledgeable enough to write the 5 thorough articles, and hiring an expert to write them from scratch would cost a huge chunk of money.
Should we have a writer put together an outline or rough draft and present that to the expert for editing? The client can afford that. Or what's the best way to move forward without costing a huge amount of money?
-
I see companies run into this all the time, and it gets me as well. The question is "How do I differentiate myself or my client from everyone else out there?"
You can still cover the same topics as the competition, but put your (client's) own spin on things. I think it's time to define some strategy - who is he targeting, and how does he want to interact with that group? Is he a young, hip guy? An older pillar of the community? That's where to start. Once you get those two aspects down, then the writer will have something to base the content off of, and you all can jointly develop a brand and tone.
Good luck!
-
I agree with you on the way to produce top content. I agree that not everyone can - but we need to do what's best for our clients and that's not always going to be the theoretically "perfect" answer.
-
I just realized what we were doing wrong, I'd like some feedback. We were going to go after the informational side of the client's ecommerce site where we have very little experience. I think we need to be unique and draw on the client's strengths. A little bit of those informational side articles would be good, but everyone in this industry is already providing that information really well. I think we need to focus on the client's products themselves, and the client has more experience with that than almost anyone.
-
Hi David,
That's a very price-conscious way to go. If I'm understanding this it would cost about 10 times less than EGOL's method. However, I very highly respect EGOL's methods. It's a bit confusing since you're an authority.
David, could you explain when it's important, in your opinion, to hire a content writer that's an expert in his field as we are planning on doing and when it's appropriate to simply go back and forth between the client and a good writer. Keep and mind that the client doesn't know everything about the topic in this case and the good writer that we have contacted will pull everything off of every credible piece of the web she can find.
In our case the content writer we could afford would be the right graduate student at an accredited university. Maybe that's not good enough, I don't know
-
"This answer completely eliminates at least 70% of small businesses from creating great content."
I think that if you go out on the web and look at who is producing "best on the web" content.... less than 10% of small businesses are participants.
-
"If you want good stuff you gotta pay the price."
This answer completely eliminates at least 70% of small businesses from creating great content. There are always ways. We do SEO profitably at a level that you would not even talk to the client. It's all about the goals.
The question posed is "what's the best way to move forward without costing a huge amount of money" and you say "there isn't." 99% of the content on the net isn't written by a team of 6 people taking 10 days to write 500 words. Hiring a professional copywriter is a LOT better than writing it yourself, hiring a content expert is a great choice when the budget allows. In everyone's "perfect world" this is a great answer - but here in the real world, you have to make some choices. It's not "squandering" your money if you're putting out the professional content in your niche because everyone else is writing it themselves.
Of course, you'd never hire a single general copywriter to write technical manuals on computer systems they don't understand. But to write some articles for a small business? C'mon.
-
Get the client to give you the outline/topics and have a writer put it together and then have client tweek
-
I don't think that I would hire a "copywriter" where a "content expert" is needed... and at the same time a "content expert" might not be the best person to write the copy.
I think that a collaboration between them might yield a "start" at a good article if the copywriter is pliable and the content expert has a lot of patience.
The process will take an awful lot more time than a content expert who is able to write effectively.
Missing in the mix still is a source of photos, images, data tables and graphs that clearly illustrate the topic.
A lot of the best content on the web requires several days of work from multiple people - for a couple thousand words with images.
"Hiring an expert to write them from scratch would cost a huge chunk of money."
If you want good stuff you gotta pay the price.
The few people who are willing to pay the price will get the rewards and the people who try to compete on the cheap will squander their money.
-
It depends what is a "huge amount of money" I guess.
We get our in-house copywriter at a great rate. She is a talented writer we found on Twitter. We charge her out at $10 per 100 words so if you wanted 5, 500 word articles, it would cost $250. That's middle-level pricing. Super expensive would be hiring a full time copywriter who knows what they're worth for a half day. Could be $600-1000 easily. I have one we use sometimes for big jobs b/c she knows what those clients want. On the other end, you could easily get someone on Fiverr to write the 5 articles for $25 but you will need to edit them and pretty them up. It just depends whether their structure would work for you. Also, you could probably find someone to go the other way - present an outline and have them do the writing bits and then you just edit again based on that.
Other than Fiverr, other low cost places to get writers (high chaff ratio though) are oDesk, Elance and Guru.
Hope that helps and happy new year!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google has discovered a URL but won't index it?
Hey all, have a really strange situation I've never encountered before. I launched a new website about 2 months ago. It took an awfully long time to get index, probably 3 weeks. When it did, only the homepage was indexed. I completed the site, all it's pages, made and submitted a sitemap...all about a month ago. The coverage report shows that Google has discovered the URL's but not indexed them. Weirdly, 3 of the pages ARE indexed, but the rest are not. So I have 42 URL's in the coverage report listed as "Excluded" and 39 say "Discovered- currently not indexed." When I inspect any of these URL's, it says "this page is not in the index, but not because of an error." They are listed as crawled - currently not indexed or discovered - currently not indexed. But 3 of them are, and I updated those pages, and now those changes are reflected in Google's index. I have no idea how those 3 made it in while others didn't, or why the crawler came back and indexed the changes but continues to leave the others out. Has anyone seen this before and know what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
Should I redirect a domain we control but which has been labeled 'toxic' or just shut it down?
Hi Mozzers: We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.' Thanks in advance, dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Can i get banned for my content?
Last night all our indexed pages are gone from google. Completely deindexed - banned. Links could not cause it, all of them are related, anchors diversified and spam is never used. Content is the same like our other website has, just some small changes. First stronger website is working as usual. So can it be that duplicate content caused a complete ban? (Website is 6 months old. Content has never been properly indexed, due to same reasons i think. Last week we made changes, ant it started to get indexed quite well until tonight..)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
SEO Tools You Can't Live Without?
Hi Guys, I'm currently in the middle of creating a comprehensive blog post covering SEO Tools that I wouldn't be able to work without. So far I've got the following down, as I use these on a day to day basis and they make my job infinitely easier. SEOMoz / OSE AHrefs BuzzStream Scrapebox Xenu / Screaming Frog Excel GWT / Analytics / Adwords Keyword Tool What tools or subscriptions do you use on a daily basis and couldn't be without?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SebastianCowie2 -
E-Commerce site - How do I geo-target towns/cities/states if there aren't any store locations?
Site = e-commerce Products = clothing (no apparel can be location specific like sports gear where you can do the location specific team gear (NBA, NFL, etc)) Problems = a. no store front b. I don't want to do any sitewides (footers, sidebars, etc) because of the penguin update Question = How do you geo-target these category pages and product pages? Ideas = a. reviews with clients locations b. blog posts with clients images wearing apparel and location description and keywords that also links back to that category or be it product page (images geo- targeted, tags, and description) c. ? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cyclone0 -
Guest posts/article marketing can be considered as paid posts by SEs?
Hi, Guest posting/article Marketing is a major part of our link building strategy. Normally we get one or two links for our site and one or two links to other authority sites(relevant). Some time author bio is not published with article or even not mention that this is a guest post. ( I know that we get just link and missed the other advantages of guest if author bio isn't mention) Is this a good practice especially when some posts are published on low quality blogs? SEs can be considered these as paid posts? What will be the better way to do this? Thanks Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray0