How many articles does a writer normally writes in a day??

How many articles does a writer normally writes in a day??

 

It's based on hours. If it's professional one then may be in 30-45 minutes. But, for a start, give it a 1 hour time /500 word article with research. Over my side, I'm providing like 50x500 daily if requested in 24 hour time. So it';s based on how much experience the writer have in this field and you can get quicker contents in may be like 20 minutes sometime if the niche is of their interest.

 

i guess it depends on the writer capability. Its he who rules the words.

 

Best I've done is 200 relatively basic articles in one day. It nearly killed me!

 

I think 6-8 articles counting 8 hours.

 

8 articles in in 8 hours if the system is working properly and fast as well.

 

I think 7-8 articles. Research is also required to write a good informative article.

 

Hmm depends on topic, but a prolific writer can come up with 10 a day.

 

A writer has not a "normal" or average daily writing quota set. Writing depends on many factors not just skills, complexity or involved research, but also every-day issues that might be reflected in the number of articles written every day, including personal, business or household affairs to attend.

 

How many words on average should an article be?

 

Sheesh after reading this thread, I know I'm not charging enough. Research and write an article in less than an hour? Mustn't include all that much in-depth research.

 

It's impossible to compare yourself to anyone on here because there aren't enough details about the actual work. I've written articles that take 2 minutes to research and can be written in 20 minutes and I've written those that could almost be a thesis and take weeks to get right.

 

Most writers I know can write about 5-8 articles a day about 1 an hour. As far as research goes that is why some experts make more because they are educated on the subject. Personally I would not pay someone to do research/educate themselves, I am not a educational scholarship program. But I will pay extra for people who are experts in certain fields.
On a general basic subject I can open about 3-5 different web sources read them compile some basic info from that write an article in about an 1-hour to 1.5-hours and there you have a basic web article much different then an expert written article.

 

I guess it all depends upon whether you are writing a basic/general article about a topic or trying to craft something useful that people actually link to. I just don't see a piece sourced and written in an hour doing that.

I'll give you an example from my own work.

I was writing an article about a painting yesterday. The subject was a saint, who was painted with a particular object that I had never seen associated with him. I could have easily just mentioned the artist, the medium, the size of the painting, when it was completed and a sentence or two describing the painting. Most of the competing sites don't include even that much information.

However, there was a metaphor within the painting. An art textbook, that talked about the painting, also used a term I had never seen before. Neither the metaphor nor the term were really explained in the textbook or my other sources. I could have mentioned both and simply assumed my reader would know more than I did; several experts on the subject had already made that assumption. Or, I could do more research and include explanations of both concepts within my piece. That term turned out to be interesting enough that it could easily become an article of it's own, which could be used to link back to the one I wrote yesterday. The metaphor could easily be used to build a third article.

It took me longer than an hour to write the piece. But, IMHO, my article is far more interesting. I also have two new topics to write about and can interlink all three articles to pull folks, and search engine spiders, further into my site. Visitors unfamiliar with the metaphor or term won't leave my site to find the explanations/definitions. And, I also now have an extra pair of keywords that the article can be optimized for.


On second thought, maybe you all should just ignore me and go ahead and keep churning out stuff worrying more about quantity over quality. That will just leave more room for my sites and my clients' sites at the top of the SERPs.

 

YMC you have some craft experience so probably a lot of your article came from personal knowledge and another sources other then the Internet so you have a good article. But it was probably based on your years of experience in the realm of art.

One thing about "research" on the internet is 99.5% of the time people just open web pages and collect info, so basically the info is already on the web it is just getting human spun into a new article. Which is really not that valuable at all, just your average web filler.

When you hire an expert they have knowledge and info that was accumulated from years of study at universities, seminars, work experience, etc. An expert in a certain field can put out an article that is fresh, informative and new. People into the subject read that and link to that type of material. You just do not get that type of article from 10-20 hours of "research" it comes from years of experience and usually years at an expensive university.

If I post an ad say I need a writer with knowledge of the Detroit real estate market.
I am expecting someone to respond with something like "hey, I worked in Detroit real estate for years and have an intimate knowledge of it". -Great how much do you charge?
Not- I am the BEST writer but this project will require some research so you are going to have to pay me a lot. -Yeah…Delete…

I would not pay anyone to educate themselves they are investing in their knowledge pool so they can maintain a professional status and make more then a general labor.

 

I hear what you are saying Avery. Actually, fine art is a new subject for me. I am definitely learning as I am going along. I'm more of a crafter than an artist. I've never shown an aptitude for drawing and painting and have read and studied very little in that area.

Your Detroit Realtor example is a good one. Sure, experience in the field can make a world of difference. Articles written quickly by an SME can work well as filler. If the SME has some standing in the industry, they can even bring their audience with them.

However, hiring SME's may not always be the best course of action. Every client that I've had has admitted that I asked questions that their customers ask all the time but folks in the biz take for granted. Quite a few have even admitted to learning something about their own industry from what I've written for them. It seems those folks who are busy working in a field rarely have the time to study trends or do more than glance at the new products - not perhaps the smartest biz strategy - but it's the reality of owning a business.

Keeping with your real estate example...every section of the country has shorthand it uses in the real estate market. Where we used to live, having a FROG in a house was quite desirable. I've lived in several other states and the use of that acronym seems limited to that region. Few local, and even less out of town buyers, knew that FROG stands for 'Finished Room Over the Garage'. The Realtors I worked with thought nothing of using the phrase. Despite being asked by almost every out of state client what it meant, they never thought to define it in their marketing materials. They were simply too close to it.

Almost every Realtor also seems to forget that their websites are not priced by column inches or limited by field sizes of the local MLS systems. They just haven't been trained to think that way.

I think a copywriter, who knows and understands the real estate industry, is sometimes a far better choice than someone who works in a particular market everyday. They often forget to think like a customer. I tease my clients that things like 'FROG' is secret Realtor-speak code. They get sucked into worrying about what everyone else is doing and miss opportunities to become market leaders. A knowledgeable outsider can ask new and different questions and bring fresh ideas to the table.

Granted, if someone hired me to write about Detroit real estate, I wouldn't know one neighborhood from another. I wouldn't come to the table knowing about all of the quirky laws specific to Detroit or Michigan in general. I wouldn't know which location offers the easiest commute to General Motors or downtown. And, I don't know which neighborhoods are part of "Detroit 2.0". But, I know how to find that information. I do know how to market a Realtor and real estate. (Heck, I even know that Realtor is supposed to be capitalized - something several real estate professionals I've worked with didn't know.) I can educate/remind my clients that their potential clients don't know that info either and it should be part of their marketing materials.

Hiring a SME might get you all that and more. But, in my experience, all it does is get you essay filler content and the advice to do the same thing everyone else in town in doing.

 

You bring up some good points in the copywriter vs SME writer, I agree with some but I do think it really depends on the article. A jack of many trades can never master one.
Take Detroit real estate for example this is a extremely complex subject that wanders into many different realms.
-Commercial and residential real estate decay and rejuvenation, city planning, urban planning, inner city real estate trends, population trends and patterns and how they apply to what it happening in Detroit today.
Then you have many financial angles that all home buyers/investors are wondering about finical trends, patterns and how they overlap on a city like Detroit.
You would also need local info such as what are the nice parts of town for the audience you are targeting what parts of town have held value historically -though poor economic times.
The list could go on and on.. and each one of these is a fairly complex subject that could many hours of study to decades of study. It would take a very educated person and a skilled writer to blend complex subjects like these into a well written article.

There are tons of "Detroit real estate" articles and they are shallow and lame people discard them like junk mail. I think it would take an expert to write an informative and interesting article that educated people would actually read and post links to.

If was looking for a Detroit real estate article I would be impressed with your writing style and ambition, but as soon as you said you need to be compensated for "research" I would probably look to the career real estate writers with years and possibly decades local knowledge.

 

For the "write me an article on ____" assignment, I agree with you about someone with a strong background wouldn't need to charge for their research. Of course, in that case you are paying for an expert in their field, not necessarily a writer. For the "I need to sell my services, establish my credibility in the marketplace and talk directly to my potential customers" assignment, most subject matter experts would generally write an essay or white paper and claim it was a marketing piece because they inserted client's name here and there.

Several of my clients have come to me after hiring one of these experts and receiving a generic essay instead of a marketing piece. They had paid more than I charged and didn't get what they asked for. In one case, it was canned material that they used for another client. In a worse case, the information from the SME was out of date and presented like a doctoral thesis rather than something designed for customers. (Little old me, who had never worked in that industry before, discovered their facts were wrong. I will concede on that one, that had they hired another SME, rather than me, one would hope the second expert would have found the errors as well.)

I had never heard of Detroit 2.0 until I wrote my last reply. It was mentioned in what I saw as a very shallow article written by someone from Realtor.com and posted on Forbes. There was very little information that required local expertise and one of the few non-mathematical specifics mentioned had to be corrected by someone leaving a comment. They are publishing similar articles where I live which paint a rosy picture of our real estate market. Hopefully, in Detroit, the article reflects what's really happening. By me, the statistics are being interpreted in a way that defies common sense.

Many of the examples you mentioned needing a SME are fairly common throughout the country and the industry. While most cities don't have banks bull dozing homes, they all are facing many of the issues you mentioned. Sure, a local expert could write faster than a skilled writer and researcher, but I would still bet that an experienced writer could come up with an equivalent or even better piece.



It's a tradeoff. Do you pay a higher hourly rate for an expert in that field? Or do you pay what's most likely a lower hourly rate for someone who has to conduct more research? I suspect in the end, it balances out somewhat.

I've seen some SME's charge $500-1,000 for a basic article. The highest price I've ever charged a client for an article was $250. In that case the assignment was to write an "encyclopedic, so I will become the primary source of information on that topic article." I would argue that an expert would never have included all of the information that I did. In the end, $250 was a bargain for all the research that went into that piece.




and, p.s.

I worked for a Realtor on a neighborhood piece (my idea, not hers). A neighborhood that she did not like to work in because she saw it as too run down, was, in fact, the hot new place in town. Prices were skyrocketing as more and more people were buying these gorgeous, but run down, 90+ year old homes and renovating them back to their old glory. I had the facts and figures from my research. She was the expert but was working off of a "feeling" rather than fact. After I showed her the numbers, she made a tidy sum selling several homes in that neighborhood.

Maybe she was just too busy to do her own homework but I know she was not the only Realtor in town who missed what was going on. I'm just saying that sometimes, even if it takes more time to research, that an outsider can prove to be a far better investment.


Thanks for the interesting conversation. There's sadly so little of it around here.

 

The more I ponder on some of the better articles I have read many were from just basic good writers doing a "piece". And some of the poorer articles have been from "experts" giving a generic canned response angled at someone's financial agenda.

I have been watching and reading as newspapers and other media go broke and just spew out little junk articles on why you should buy this stock or how the economy has reached recovery a lot by "experts" with degrees and years of expensive school. But I guess they are not getting paid to educate people or strike up intelligent conversation they are getting paid to sell agendas.
Then I will read a lot of smaller independent medias sources with basic young writers that are putting out some good articles with reality and research into them.
I guess a lot of it is the article, media source and what agenda someone has that is paying for the article. Sadly most of the comment sections under the articles usually have better info then the articles.

I have written and bought articles with different angles and knowledge then was already on the web and I have seen a huge difference in bounce rate, rankings and backlinks. That is why unless it is fresh stuff from someone well of knowledge I just don't see much value in it.
When most people tell me they have to research a subject I usually don't visualize them going to the library of congress or interviewing professors, I visualize them opening a few web pages and manually spinning it, which is ok for filler not every web page is a priceless work of knowledge nor can webmasters spend hundreds on everypage.

 

In my experience, a good writer can complete an article of reasonable quality in about 30-45 minutes; surprisingly quickly.