So you started a website and are regularly adding blog content. As the site starts to grow, you notice that traffic starts to plateau. That one blog published every week or two holds the traffic steady, but you want to continue scaling the site growth. Scaling growth requires writing more content, but many publishers run everything by themselves, and writing good content takes time. So how can you find writers for your blog or website to help scale growth?
Below, I’ll share with you how to find writers for your blog or website that can produce great content that produces true ROI for your efforts.
Article updated May 19, 2020
Does writing more content equal to more traffic?
This is a question that many publishers ask when they reach this milestone. Believe it or not, blogging success comes just as much from quantity as quality. If the content is of excellent quality, that’s great. But even if it’s “B” level work and you’re posting regularly, you’ll have better results—more traffic, more shares—than if you are not producing content regularly.
The 2020 Publisher Performance Report confirms that. The 10 websites with the highest revenue growth wrote an average of 85 articles, compared to 25 articles published from the lowest-earning 10 websites.
The truth is to scale your website’s growth consistently, the content has to be coming out quickly, be well-researched, and be of strong quality.
The solution is to hire outside writers who can produce good, on-topic content for your site on a regular schedule. These types of writers can understand your business and represent the brand, only without you having to make few (if any) changes to their content. But how do you find them?
How to find good writers for your website
1. Fiverr/Upwork
Most people might think of Fiverr or Upwork for hiring content writers. While you can find good writers on these websites, you get what you pay for.
You aren’t going to get very good prose from a writer you’re offering $10 for an article. Additionally, there’s a tendency that non-native English speakers from outside of English-speaking countries are more likely to charge lower rates per word or per article.
But if you do decide to use these sites, be choosy. The money you spend on a quality freelance writer will provide good ROI. Quality content tends to attract quality visitors, and quality visitors attract quality advertisers.
2. Facebook / Social Media
Facebook groups could be a source of writers. Let’s say your website is niche site catering to dog owners. You might join a bunch of dog owner Facebook groups to get content ideas from posts. Additionally, the people within these groups are likely long-time dog owners with a lot of expertise in the topic. You might find someone in one of those groups who is interested in writing for your website at an affordable price compared to professional freelancers.
However, it’s important to remember to make sure that person is reliable, a good writer, and can listen to directions. Oftentimes, website owners will “test” writers before hiring them on to write posts. This is probably a good idea so your money is money well spent.
3. Popular publications or your own site’s visitors
The smartest way to find good writers is to simply look at who’s writing for the sites and publications you already enjoy. Whether magazines or online sites, odds are good that those writers also do freelance work on the side. Although it’s possible that someone who is used to writing features for WIRED or The Economist might ask a lot more than you’ve budgeted for the project.
“Hire fanatical visitors or readers, those may be your best content producers…”
You can also look at your customer base: if you have super enthusiastic customers who already write about your product or service, they could be an excellent choice to bring on board. Easy enough. Email them and ask if they’d like to write a guest post or two and if those work out, a longer-term contract can be negotiated.
How much should you pay writers?
How much you should pay writers depends on a few different factors. What is your budget? Are you looking for an entry-level writer to save money or an in-demand expert? Knowing some of the answers to these questions before you start hiring writers is a smart idea.
Below is a table of what you can generally expect to pay for writers on a per-word basis:
- Entry-level: .03-.06
- Intermediate: .07-.12
- Experienced: .13-.20
- In-demand expert: .21-30
Oftentimes, writers might request being paid per project or hourly as well. Hourly figures tend to be estimated by 500 words written per hour.
Thumbtack cites the average price paid to writers for a single article is between $120-250 for U.S.-based writers. But this varies drastically based on word count, topic, and if your writer is a native English speaker.
Ballpark $250-$400 per article for a good writer with significant subject matter knowledge, and as much as $500-$600 per article for a rare expert in the field. This is the estimation based on a 1000-1500 word article. If the article you want written is shorter, that can help cut costs.
The key is to ensure that they agree to deliver unique content on-schedule, week after week.
If your topics are broader in nature, you may be able to get by with a researcher with writing skills that you could pay less than half of that cost. But you’ll want to measure how this content does on your site.
Additionally, you will be able to get more out of your writers if you learn effective content writing and SEO yourself before outsourcing the job to someone else.
How to get the most out of your hired writers for your website
The easiest way to get the most out of your hired writers for your website is to first write your own content. Even serial site builders who build multiple sites per year (by outsourcing their content writing), most of them built their first sites from scratch and learned how to write for SEO before outsourcing the work.
The reason why this is so important is that paying for quality written content is very costly. Spencer Haws, the founder of Niche Pursuits, is a serial site builder and has built dozens of successful content websites. Below is his balance sheet for one of his websites. It’s clear that he spends the majority of all his money investing in writers, and with good reason. He spent 9,200 dollars on content writers and editors. This was 62 percent of his total cost to build out the website.
If you’re ready to outsource some of your content writing, chances are you’ve already produced a good amount of written content on your own. But if you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to invest in content writers, here’s what you can do.
Create a writing guide for writers that you do hire. If you don’t have your own, our Content Writing Guide is a great place to help craft your own. These guides serve as a sort of “rulebook” for your writers to reference. On top of that, you can create article templates with the topic you want them to write to help them more quickly and efficiently write good content.
Wrapping up how to find writers for your blog or website
Don’t be surprised if your first writer doesn’t work out either, unfortunately. Even writers with excellent reputations can turn out to be difficult to work with when you’re stuck waiting for their latest update on the project. Make sure your contract has a performance clause and move on to the next writer quickly if you must.
And before you know it, the hassle of your business blog transforms into a center of excellence that drives traffic to your site.
Here are some additional resources for best practices around content writing and SEO:
- What Content Length Earns The Most Money From Ads?
- Ethically Sharing Content To Earn Ad Revenue
- Using On-Page SEO To Create More Successful Content
- How This Content Creator Does Keyword Research For A Niche Site
- How To Handle Outdated Content, Earn More Traffic, & Grow Ad Earnings
How has your experience been hiring and finding writers for your blog or website? Let me know in the comments.
