A recent post about ghostwriters caused some readers to ask where they could find people to write for them. Here are some tips and resources to help you hire writers.
Creating enough content to keep your blog current, post to social media and create new products can be hard, especially if you are trying to do it all yourself. If you are finding it hard to keep up, maybe it is time to hire some writers.
It’s hard to find people who can write, especially if you want people to write in your voice. That can be darn near impossible. But here are some suggestions on where you might be able to find some people to do some writing for you at different price points.
If you want really, really cheap writers, yes, you can get really, really cheap writers. They’re not necessarily going to be good and reliable. So consider that part of what is going to determine the quality of the writing you get is how much you pay.
Paying a lot doesn’t guarantee that you get good writing, but paying very little almost guarantees you’re not going to get very good writing.
Let’s look at some places where you can find writers.
You can advertise on craigslist. Sometimes you can find people who are looking for things that they can do from home on their own schedule. They may have good skills but they are willing to work fairly inexpensively because they want to work while their kids are asleep or in school or they want to have the flexibility to work whenever they have time. Maybe they’re dealing with an illness and they want to work when they’re feeling well and rest when they get tired. Don’t limit yourself to just the craigslist in your town. Think about craigslist in other towns, especially if you live in a very high cost of living place. Sometimes you can find writers who work less expensively in an area where the cost of living is less.
Warriorforum.com is an Internet marketing forum, and there are a number of people who offer writing services there. There is a Warriors for Hire section where people advertise their availability. And there’s also a place where you can post that you’re looking for people to do things.
Elance.com is a site where you can hire freelancers to do work. You can also hire writers for everything from short posts to ebooks at iWriter.com.
fiverr.com is a place where people will do all kinds of things for $5. Writing is one of those things. I’ve gotten press releases and articles written there. Some of them were pretty darn good and some of them…not so much. So it’s one of those things where you kind of take your chances, but you can look at the feedback that workers have gotten and you’ll find that there are some people who are very good there. At fiverr.com you’re only risking $5 so it’s not like it’s the end of the world if an article isn’t very good.
So how do you go about choosing writers? Number one, ask for samples. You may not be able to do that in some venues. And I’m not talking about having them write something specifically for you, but just asking them to provide some samples of their writing. This is not something you are going to pay them for or use, they are just showing you an example of what they have written.
You can also test them on a small job. Ask them to write a single article or a small group of articles. Did they finish the assignment on time? Did they do a good job? Did they plagiarize them? Run them all through Copyscape or some other plagiarism checker to make sure they didn’t just copy something from somewhere else online. That happens more than you want to believe.
When you hire a writer, have an agreement that they are transferring all ownership rights to the work to you. It can be as simple as an email or a formal written agreement, but make sure they understand that they are not to resell or reuse anything they write for you, and get it in writing.
Expect that you’re probably going to have to go through eight or ten writers to find one really good one. It takes a lot of trial and error, mostly error, to find the writers that are going to work well for you, but it’s worth it when you find the great ones.
