Have you been trying to outsource content writing projects with little success? Have you been struggling to find a freelancer you trust to complete your work in an on-time and high-quality manner? If so, you’re not alone.
In today’s ever-expanding digital sphere, nearly every company has a pileup of content writing work that they need to take care of. Some want to expand their blogging efforts in order to gain increased organic traffic. Some want to revamp their website copy in order to attract new customers and boost their brand’s reputation. Still others want to write informative ebooks, transform their social media channels, or boost their professional identities.
All of these projects are important and worthwhile – and all of them are time-consuming. They’re the kinds of tasks that can easily get pushed onto the back burner when manpower is running short. Even businesses that have robust internal marketing teams often find themselves with an overflow of work that requires outsourcing.
But where can you go to find the right content writer? That’s a question that many of our clients have struggled with, and it’s one that we’ll aim to answer today by exploring the problems with one of our field’s most popular sourcing strategies: the freelance marketplace.
What Is a Freelance Marketplace?
A freelancer marketplace is a platform that allows companies to hire specialists for specific jobs. In turn, freelancers reply to job posts and promote their own skills in order to get hired. Then, the business and the freelancer connect remotely through the marketplace’s platform in order to establish a contract and embark on a project together.
Popular freelance marketplaces include Fiverr and Upwork, although neither of these is dedicated exclusively to writing tasks. For writing tasks in particular, there’s also ProBlogger, another similar job-board hosting platform.
Sounds simple enough, right? Not exactly…
There are a number of challenges associated with freelance marketplaces that make them a suboptimal outsourcing strategy for many small and midsize businesses. We’re going to explore those challenges in detail, and then we’ll dive into some more efficient and effective methods to outsource your work content writing work.
5 Reasons Freelance Marketplaces Don’t Work
#1: They Require Weeding Through Numerous Applicants
Let’s start at the beginning. When you want to hire someone from a freelance marketplace like Upwork, you’ll first have to post a job. That involves writing a brief overview of what you’re looking for, your budget, and the preferred qualifications of applicants.
Once you post the job, you can expect applications to start flooding in. At first, this can seem like a good thing: You have plenty of options! But you’ll quickly find that the sheer number of applicants these platforms allow can become a huge time suck. You’ll sometimes need to read through cover letters, work samples, and resumes from over 50 potential writers.
You may also need to interview applicants to find the best fit. This process can eat up lots of time and energy. And once you find the right freelancer, there’s always the possibility that they won’t actually be the one doing the work…
#2: Many Freelancers Outsource Work Overseas
It’s a sad but increasingly common phenomenon: Many freelancers are outsourcing their work overseas. Imagine this: You find a freelancer via Upwork or Fiverr who seems qualified and nice. After reading some work samples and conducting a phone interview, you feel confident committing to a contract with them. You’re going to pay them $50 per hour.
Then, you get the work back, and it’s shockingly bad. It’s nothing like the writing samples you read before taking on the project! What on earth happened?
Here’s the thing: Overseas labor in other countries is much cheaper than labor in the United States. Of course, that price cut comes at the expense of quality. It’s very easy for a supposedly U.S.-based freelancer to charge you $50 per hour and then pay a writer in Asia to do the same work for $10 per hour. They’re still making $40 per hour for doing absolutely nothing.
There are some disciplines in which outsourcing work overseas is perfectly fine and has little to no impact on quality. But when it comes to writing, that’s simply not the case. You’re going to want a writer who is a fluent English speaker and understands all the nuances of our language and grammar. Otherwise, your content’s quality will suffer.
#3: Managing Freelancer Communication Falls on You
If you hire a freelancer through a marketplace, you’ll be communicating with that person on a regular basis in order to ensure the work gets done on time. Some freelancers disregard deadlines altogether, and you’ll end up hounding them to get your content by the time that you need it. The marketplace platforms don’t help you manage this process.
Constant communication with a freelancer is yet another way that outsourcing content writing work through a marketplace can actually eat up even more of your time. Most people want to outsource work in order to save time, not to spend it bugging someone to finish a project.
#4: There’s No Guarantee of Quality
Marketplaces like Upwork, Fiverr, and ProBlogger don’t have quality guarantees in place. Even if a freelancer turns in unacceptable work, you will still be expected to pay them. That’s simply the risk you take when using a freelance marketplace.
You may be able to find lower costs but remember – you get what you pay for. A general rule of thumb is that if you’re paying less than $50 per hour for content writing, you’re probably not working with someone particularly reputable (or they’re cutting costs by sending your work overseas).
#5: You’ll Probably Have to Edit the Work Yourself
When you use a freelance marketplace, you’re likely to get less-than-perfect work back from your contractor. If you want them to do edits, you’ll end up paying an additional fee, and there’s still a chance it won’t be quite right. Many of our clients have shared that they ended up spending more time editing freelancer work than it would’ve taken to do it themselves. In that case, why bother hiring somebody?
5 Ways WriteHQ Fixes These Problems
Hiring a freelancer through a marketplace often causes more problems than it solves. But luckily, that’s not the only way to go about outsourcing your content writing. When you work with a premier content writing agency like WriteHQ, your content creation project will be streamlined. We’ll take the stress off your plate by fully managing your services.
On our introductory calls with clients, one of the biggest issues we hear is that they’ve struggled to find a reliable, skilled freelancer on content writing marketplaces. It’s a concern that we’ve seen time and time again – and it’s part of the reason that we’ve set up WriteHQ in the way that we have. These are just some of the ways that we’ve set ourselves apart from the subpar marketplaces out there.
#1: We Find the Perfect Writer for You
Our team is comprised of highly vetted writers and editors that specialize in many different industries. Once we have our initial consultation and learn more about your project, we’ll assign your work to the perfect writer – one who knows about your field and can produce high-quality work 100% of the time. You’ll never have to waste time sifting through piles of underqualified applicants again.
#2: We Never Outsource Work Overseas
Quality is of the utmost importance to us. We heavily vet every single one of our writers, and each piece of work goes through a rigorous proofing and copy-editing process before you ever see it. Our writers are all based in the U.S. and are fluent in English. We will NEVER send your work overseas and compromise its quality. That’s a promise.
#3: We Handle Writer Communication
When you work with WriteHQ, you won’t have to be in direct contact with your writer. Our project managers will ensure your work is complete by the deadline you have in mind. We guarantee timeliness, meaning you’ll never have to worry about compromising your schedule again. Our process streamlines your content creation work so you have less on your plate.
#4: We Guarantee Top Quality Work
Our team of writers and editors is the best in the game. Every piece of work we send out is edited, polished, and ready to go. If you ever want to make changes, we’ll allow you unlimited rounds of edits until everything is the way you want it to be. That’s just one way that WriteHQ offers unmatched value for our services.
#5: We Offer Unlimited Rounds of Edits
Part of our focus on quality comes in the form of our editing policy. We copy edit and proofread every piece of work before it goes out the door. Our goal is to provide publishing-ready content that you won’t have to spend time reworking – after all, if you wanted to spend your time doing that, you wouldn’t be hiring someone in the first place. If you still need edits, they’re on us.
Make Content Writing a Worthwhile Investment
High-quality content is an important piece of every business’s digital marketing strategy. At WriteHQ, we’ll ensure that you’re actually getting your money’s worth.
Don’t bother wasting your time with freelance marketplaces. By the time you’ve actually gotten found the right freelancer and gotten usable work, you’ll have expended even more resources than you would have if you’d decided to work with a reliable agency in the first place. Let’s just skip to the good part.
If you’re interested in outsourcing your content writing (and if you’re reading this article, we bet you are), contact us today.
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