Client Can't Write His Own Articles

[BobGW]

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?

[Textbroker]

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!

[MattAntonino]

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.

[BobGW]

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.

[BobGW]

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

[EGOL]

"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.

[MattAntonino]

"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.

[DavidKonigsberg]

Get the client to give you the outline/topics and have a writer put it together and then have client tweek

[EGOL]

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.

[MattAntonino]

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!