As you progress into online marketing & SEO, there may come a time where you would want to “outsource” your content creation to another person.
In other words, pay someone to write your content for you. Is it a good idea? I’m mostly leaning to the no side, but this is based on personal reasons I’ll explain in this post. There are major benefits of doing it however and I will cover them as well.
Paying someone to write for you (when it’s good):
Considering you have a website and a niche you are passionate about, odds are you’re going to have a ton of content ideas to work with for quite awhile.
But sooner or later, you will have moments when content ideas just simply won’t come (writer’s block is one of the reasons) and because it is important to keep your site coming in with fresh content, you will have to either force yourself to come up with something, which tends to lead to low quality content sometimes (bad for SEO) or you can hire someone to handle those things for you.
As far as I’m concerned, the only times it is acceptable to pay someone to write content for you is when:
A) It’s just 1 person you’re hiring.
I don’t like the thought of multiple people having access to my site and writing about topics that may/may not be in line with my opinions. Everyone has their own writing style as well as opinions on certain subjects and I would rather hire someone that I not only trust (second point), but also someone who agrees with my points of view on what is being written, thus making my blog/site consistent in it’s positions.
B) You trust that person. This is major.
There are a lot of places advertising guest blogging and/or writing services. Again, personally, if you’re going to hire someone to write content for you, I would make sure you know and trust that person, as well as understand their writing style.
If you can actually find someone you connect with on many different subjects and both you and they have vast amounts of experience in the niche your site is focused on, then I would hire that person and use them only when you run out of content ideas or are going through a period in life where you simply can’t blog for an X amount of time (Vacation, emergencies, ect…)
C) When you have money to invest into this.
If you are tight on money, don’t hire someone to write content for you, period. If the person in question can do it for free, by all means but even in that scenario, you should be careful especially if they want to create content and link it to their site.
Why I lean towards the no side of hiring writers (at first):
This is mostly based on my personal view but I don’t like to have anyone “help” me make my site better. I’ve always been someone who has enjoyed doing his thing and without having to rely on someone else to assist me and vice versa.
But aside from that viewpoint, unless you meet the criteria I mentioned above, I simply don’t trust anyone to write content on my site. As far as I’m concerned, my content is my online business, my livelihood and to let someone (stranger) get access to my site and have to write things which aren’t monitored well is just too risky.
Sure I can do check ups on what is being written, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of hiring someone then. The time I’d spend correcting, checking and making sure all is the way I want it to be would probably take longer than it would to just write the post myself. It’s just not worth it in my opinion.
I’ve had invitations on more than one occasion from several friends/colleagues to write blog posts on my site. In all of these scenarios, they were people who write very well and share many of my viewpoints. And in terms of payment, there were none. They just wanted me to provide a link back to their site. This is basically called guest blogging.
I had to respectfully decline. Guest blogging isn’t something I’m a big fan of to begin with and it’s SEO value has dropped as of late. This is mainly because when guest blogging was still popular, a lot of people abused the system and provided a lot of links back to low quality websites in a way to try and “piggyback” on the high authority of other sites and naturally Google stepped in and put an end to this.
Nowadays if you’re going to guest blog, make sure the person you let write on your site is a high quality writer. If their guest blog enhances your site’s content and makes it better for the reader, then I’d go for it. If not, then I wouldn’t even think twice about it.
Final thoughts:
You’ll definitely find people who disagree with me on this. I know more than a few successful online businesses who use things like guest blogging and pay people to write the content for them. But the common traits these businesses share is:
- The quality of the writers is very high.
- The content these writers put on the site/s only makes the user experience better. They write in a way that adds weight and value to the original author of the site.
You can certainly follow in the same direction, but my best advice is to do it yourself. Pick a niche you like, make a website out of it and write content on that niche. If you chose a subject you like, trust me when I say the content ideas will come fast.
If your site becomes popular and gains a lot of traffic as well as starts earning rather well, you can definitely invest a portion of the profits into hiring someone to write content on your site when you’re unable to or just want to relax. It’s almost like having a worker manage your business. But even in that scenario, I would do careful screening before trusting someone with that.
As for me, while I have never done guest blogging or hired anyone to write for me, I may one day get into this approach, but even in that instance, 99% of all my content will always be written by me because in my opinion no one will ever put the same effort into growing your business as you will.
Update: I have really changed how I look at this.
There was a time that I was VERY conservative about hiring anyone to write on my site/s but as I began to see how difficult it is to do this on your own, I was indirectly forced into doing this too.
Now it’s very hard to find anyone who is good enough or trustworthy enough to blog for your site, but here are good tips on ghost writers you should use when looking for someone and if you can find them, yes, do absolutely hire them.
And you may also elect to choose the road of freelance writing, in which case I recommend 2 sources:
- My Freelance Paycheck, which is a good program on finding gigs.
- And this article on how to hire writers and become one, all of which revolves around freelance writing.