It is easy to handle everything when you start a small blog. On a small site, you can handle all tasks like content creation, social marketing and maintenance on your own. But over the period of time, your site will grow in size. And you will start realizing that it is highly difficult to handle everything single handedly. When you focus on other priority tasks like theme modifications, automatically you will start losing the content publishing schedule.
Generally content writing and publishing takes huge time compared to other tasks. So the option is to outsource the content writing service to third parties in order to save time for doing other tasks. This strategy will work well when you plan to invest heavily on your blog as quality writers charge more than 100 dollars per hour. Unfortunately most of the blog owners do not invest heavily on the content as the return on investment would be very low. This is true especially when the site does not have millions of visitors. So they will tend to go for cheap freelancers offering content writing services for few dollars. Here are 6 simple reasons why you should not use cheap freelancers for your content writing.
Example Case
We discussed with many blog owners on content writing or so called ghost writing. The average amount an established blog owner willing to spend for content is around $500 per month. This is for getting 20 to 30 articles per month which makes it $20 spending per article approximately. This essentially means you should have >$1000 income from your blog to spend $500 on writing and manage other expenses like hosting. Let us take this as hypothetical case for further explanation, though your case may vary based on the income.
We have floated few projects with a range of $3 – $20 per article in the popular freelancing site freelancer.com and also checked on other popular sites like Guru.com. We have ignored some freelancing sites like Upwork as it is not possible to hire writers at this low rate there. We are sharing our experience below so that you don’t need to waste your time in analyzing it again.
1. Finding Experts in Your Niche
As your site had grown in size, you should already have sufficient pages describing the basics of your niche. The next step is to look for the writers who can provide advanced level of content with cheap price. Writers with advanced skills will generally charge on per hour basis. This may vary from $40 – $500 per hour. So the strategy of paying few dollars for an article and expecting advanced level of writing will not work. You will receive crap bids from the freelancers who don’t even know about your niche. At the end, you will be wasting lot of time in discussing with copy cats without any purpose.
The project we have floated on freelancer.com with $5 per article got 18 bidders in few days. This is to get tutorial articles on WordPress. We chatted with all those bidders and no single bidder knows about WordPress. When you are quoting up to $20 per article, do not expect skilled writers to quote on your low bidding project.
2. Article Spinner
Finally we have decide to really spend some money to find out the quality of those low bidding freelancing guys. So, floated another project for getting SEO articles with less than $3 per article. The result is exactly what we expected, the guy delivered 10 articles in few days of time and requested for the payment (of course we paid). We analyzed all the articles and found basically he copied from other sites, used article spinner and passed the plagiarism checker tool.
Article spinning is a popular and embarrassing method almost 90% of the freelancers do. They use free or premium tools to spin the words among existing articles to create a new article. For example, the sentence “He is a popular man” will be spinned to “The man is famous”. In most cases the final output will be ridiculous and you need spending more time on reading and understanding the meaning.
3. Funny Plagiarism Checker
Freelancers claim their work is legitimate by using the duplicate content checker or so called plagiarism checker tool. This tool basically uses Google Search or Bing Search API to check the duplication on the web. When the sentences in the article are spinned as explained above, this tool will say the check is passed.
This may work when you publish two articles out of hundred in this manner. But we never think Google is so dumb when you publish hundreds of articles just because they passed plagiarism check. Google will soon or later identify your site as a webspam and demote or delist from the search lists. Your entire hard work will be ruined just because of the low budget tendency and some lazy foolish freelancer.
4. Copied Content
With blogging is emerging as a full time job of many of the youngster, low quality freelancing sites are flooded with lot of part time freelancers. They basically work in an organization and commit their freelancing projects on part time. This will ultimately affect your schedule as anytime the freelancer might get the workload from their organization. On other hand they just try to copy from different websites to make a new article in quick time.
You will be surprised to see that people will bid for delivering 10 articles in one day (at least in our case he took few days). If you are a writer, you will know this is only possible by copying content from other sites. Also most freelancers do not provide the images for articles as this is a separate service. Which essentially means you need to spend additional bugs to get a complete article or use your own image source.
5. Poor English and Grammar
More than 80% of the freelancers are from Asian countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the two projects we have floated, 90% of the bidders are from one of these three countries.
They are not native English speakers and will not have command over the communication. Some guys we discussed have good knowledge but no idea of how to write the content that will look good on a website. So if you get writing service from them, it will be a task for you to do proofreading.
6. Fake Reviews
It can’t be true that the guy who has 1200+ five star rating can write an article like below for the title “How to Write SEO Content”:
There are lots of things one needs to keep in mind and once that is done then things will be much easier. You should try and overcome these problems and prepare the content in such a way that you do not have any kind of problem and it adds value to your website and you SEO campaign. This is a very important thing and you should keep this in mind. Hence content has to be written with SEO in mind.
This is definitely not written by a human user. In few minutes time we could find the original was from another site and this one is spinned with rotator or article spinner.
The bid amount of project does not matter for these type of freelancers. Basically they are copy cats not content writers. This is on freelancer.com where you need to have photo identity verification to open an account (applicable for both employers and freelancers). Now that we are not sure and surprised, how such a low quality guy can get 1200+ five star ratings from verified users. We also noticed the below comment on Guru.com that the site will hide negative feedbacks and show only the positive reviews.
In our opinion, the reviews are no way help you getting quality writer hence we should consider it as fake reviews.
Conclusion
It is evident when you quote $15 per article then you will not get what you are expecting. Yes, of course when you quote $50 there will be quality bidders. In such case we don’t recommend going for a freelancer, probably you should hire your own employee who can work with you in harmony.
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