What's a good WPM for a copywriter?

[helenlorettahasan]

My copywriter is currently hitting 2,100 - 2,500 words over three articles on an average day.

He is employed full time, 7.5 hours a day with a 30 minute lunch break (He has the choice of a 1 hour lunch and leaving 30 minutes later).

Let's say only 6 hours are spent researching and writing: 2,500 words / 360 minutes = 6.9WPM

The content is generally rewritten from other websites with a little bit of unique content, on topics that are usually not complicated - the articles themselves are along the lines of a broad summary of what the other website offers/does. The content I receive is fairly generic and doesn't really say anything more than the source material. No formatting is done and generally I receive very large wall-of-text paragraphs. The content is written in one program and then copy/pasted into word to be delivered.

All keywords to use are provided, as well as ~50 words and phrases related to the topic. The ~50 words and phrases are usually presented in a list ("they offer x, x, x, x and x, as well as x, x and x" etc), so this part of the task shouldn't be taking long.

I am trying to gauge whether this is typical and what I should expect from someone who does this each day, as from previous roles I know more is definitely doable, but as for whether it's doable every working day I'm not sure.

What do you usually receive from your copywriters for a day of work?

[KevinBudzynski]

Logan nailed the answer. Quality over content always. Even if you have good metrics, you may not have a baseline to compare to it yet. One way is hiring an independent contractor to produce 5 or so articles and compare metrics and cost and go from there. It's difficult to do, but you should always be testing! Good luck.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

I wouldn't measure your copywriter based on WPM, I'd focus instead on the quality of the writing. I recommend measuring based on the performance of the content. Is it helping improve rankings? Driving traffic? Nurturing leads? Increasing sales? I don't know what your line of business is, but I would choose some KPIs by which you measure the effectiveness of the content being produced. It doesn't matter if it's 1 WPM if that creates 3x as much revenue as content that was written at 100 WPM.