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
-
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
Can new domain extensions rank?
Hi Does anybody know if it's possible to get domains with extensions like .party or .world to rank? Even for high competitive keywords? Can they rank over .com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeWU0 -
Why isn't the rel=canonical tag working?
My client and I have a problem: An ecommerce store with around 20 000 products has nearly 1 000 000 pages indexed (according to Search Console). I frequently get notified by messages saying “High number of URLs found” in search console. It lists a lot of sample urls with filter and parameters that are indexed by google, for example: https://www.gsport.no/barn-junior/tilbehor/hansker-votter/junior?stoerrelse-324=10-11-aar+10-aar+6-aar+12-aar+4-5-aar+8-9-aar&egenskaper-368=vindtett+vanntett&type-365=hansker&bruksomraade-367=fritid+alpint&dir=asc&order=name If you check the source code, there’s a canonical tag telling the crawler to ignore (..or technically commanding it to regard this exact page as another version of the page without all the parameters) everything after the “?” Does this url showing up in the Search Console message mean that this canonical isn’t working properly? If so: what’s wrong with it? Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
Sigurd0 -
Can't get page moving!
Hi all. I've been working on a page for months now and can't seem to make any progress. I'm trying to get http://www.alwayshobbies.com/dolls-houses on the first page for term 'dolls houses'. I've done the following: Cleaned up the site's overall backlink profile Built some new links to the page Added 800 words of new copy Reduced the number of keyword instances on the page below 15 Any advice would be much appreciated. I don't think it's down to links as the DA/PA isn't wildly different from its competitors. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
My Website Has a Google Penalty, But I Can't Disavow Links
I have a client who has definitely been penalized, rankings dropped for all keywords and hundreds of malicious backlinks when checked with WebMeUp....However, when I run the backlink portfolio on Moz, or any other tool, they don't appear anyone, and all the links are dead when I click on the actual URL. That being said, I can't disavow links that don't exist, and they don't show up in Webmaster Tools, but I KNOW this site has been penalized. Also- I noticed this today (attached). Any suggestions? I've never come across this issue before. xT6JNJC.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 01023450 -
Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hi all, my site www.uniggardin.dk has lost major rankings on the searchengine google.dk. Went from rank #2-3 on important keywords to my site, and after the latest update most of my rankings have jumped to #12 - #20. This is so annoying, and I really have no idea what to do. Can it cause bad links to my site? In that case what will I have to do? Thanks in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xpeztumdk
Christoffer0 -
How can I tell if a website is a 'NoFollow'?
I've been link building for a long time but have recently discovered that most of my links are from NoFollow links, such as twitter and Youtube. How can I tell if a website is a 'NoFollow'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
Re-Direct Users But Don't Affect Googlebot
This is a fairly technical question... I have a site which has 4 subdomains, all targeting a specific language. The brand owners don't want German users to see the prices on the French sub domain and are forcing users into a re-direct to the relevant subddomain, based on their IP address. If a user comes from a different country, (ie the US) they are forced on the UK sub domain. The client is insistent on keeping control of who sees what (I know that's a debate in it's own right), but these re-directs we're implementing to make that happen, are really making it difficult to get all the subdomains indexed as I think googlebot is also getting re-directed and is failing to do it's job. Is there are a way of re-directing users, but not Googlebot?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0