DP Writing absolute crap?

I'll jump in from a buyers point of view here and explain what it is I'm looking for when I go looking for writers and perhaps help explain why some of us expect things so cheaply.

Earlier this week I was looking for video reviewers to give a synopsis of half hour niche tv shows for my employers. I appreciate this is a little different to normal article writing as no real research or specialist knowledge is required beyond understanding what was happening in the show and indeed most of the shows have an educational element in it designed to let you follow the flow of play.

As we're a very small company I tend to wear numerous hats including being in charge of content, SEO, some design, some marketing, some CRM and some support :s

With this is mind I was looking to outsource some of this task as it was fairly time consuming, I was completing about 3 an hour between doing everything else that needs done. Descriptions were about 250-300 words and I had found a selection of good keywords to base articles on for each video/series so that they practically wrote themselves.

Last couple of months I struggled to get a budget together to take care of the things involved in wearing all my hats so thought I could maybe spend some of that to get this content produced more quickly.

Looking on DP the forums (and has been attested to) it looked like I could get this done quite cheaply (although as I've since discoverd, poorly), so I threw up a request for writers. I never stated a budget, because I genuinely wasn't sure what I should be charging, but assumed it'd run me to a few hundred dollars.

Got a couple of replies along with the samples/portfolios and basically I wouldn't touch them. Whilst the point of the articles is just so the search engines can read what the videos are about (when will Google get round to making spiders that watch them ) they still have to read well for our human viewers.

So having been around the content forums (and further afield) for some time I contacted one of our more esteemed members asking for advice. They kindly provided some recommendations, which I am yet to follow up, but ultimately led to me reading this thread.

Reading here has been interesting and informative, however it is also a little disappointing. Looking to get a good writer (and please correct me if prices for these video reviews should be lower than normal articles) will run me to a minimum of $0.12 a word? Assuming they manage the same 3 articles an hour at 300 words per description as I did, that'll be $108 an hour, more if they're faster or more expensive.

I currently earn about $20 odds an hour. Now, I'm in no way implying that people aren't worth that or that I should be getting paid more (well, actually I should ) however for something that I can do myself I resent paying somebody 5x as much as I earn. I know that the money isn't coming from my own pocket but for the 70 (going up to 250 or so) videos that I need reviewed I'll have a hard time justifying spending $2500 on something my company believe they're paying me for doing.

Again I appreciate the risk freelancers take with not having a guaranteed income and rates generally reflect that and also that if it's being outsourced chances are the people are really needing it done so may be willing to pay more.

In this instance however there are affiliate links in place of the show descriptions, so if there aren't any descriptions it's only really an SEO matter. I'll just have to work through them and put them up slowly (not necessarily a bad thing for growing organically) but as I like things to be complete it irks me that it's not.

Now, it could be because I'm a tight-fisted Scot but I imagine a lot of people looking for writers on here are of a similar mind frame. Of course I understand that I should take into account what extra revenue this may bring in, the benefits of having a complete site etc etc, but for 4 or 5 days work (3 articles an hour, 7 hour days, 70 articles to complete) I don't really want to pay out a month's wages.

Perhaps it's the per word rather than time spent aspect that doesn't work in this instance, but I'm sure programers etc started off charging hourly and have moved onto per job perhaps writers should write based on a fair wage for estimated time spent rather than how long the article is. I guess that will end up in the same boat though with workers who think $1 an hour is a fair wage.

Anyway, I kind of lost focus halfway through (see, writing is hard), but I hope that perhaps explains one of the reasons why employers look to the penny-a-word writers rather than seek out quality writers.

 

If you know anyone who can churn out quality content at the rate of 15 words a minute give them my number, I'll pay them £50/$100 an hour (that's less then electrician/plumbers charge in the UK!)

If you are as smart as you're tight you'll take that as a job offer

 

Lol,

it's a little bit different with the videos reviews I guess, it's just a case of say what you see (it's good but it's not right). So I skip through and watch maybe 10 mins of video total, ignore the dull bits, write down three or four things that happened and work it around one or two key words relating to the niche or watching tv online.

It ends up being a good description of the show, without giving away everything so people watch it and hopefully search engines now know what that page is about.

I'll happily write you stuff for £50 an hour, indeed if you have a full time vacancy I'll leave my current job

 

You're right in that a lot of people here are in a similar mind frame. Here's the way I look at is as a professional writer though:

If someone either can't write it themselves, and they can't afford to hire a professional, they're in the wrong line of work, or they need to simply accept that they won't get professional quality (or at least that it's very highly unlikely for that to happen). As a buyer, the general rule is that you outsource to basically save yourself money, b/c you'll earn more than you're spending by being able to reallocate that time elsewhere. If you wouldn't be, then writing it yourself really is the best option.

$.12 / word isn't much for hiring a professional, but there are definitely some who would do it for less (maybe around the $.05 per word range thinking of one or two people off the top of my head). However, that's still more than what you're saying you make yourself per hour, so it still wouldn't make sense to outsource to someone who could provide quality work at those rates. Your next option would be to see if they would offer a discount for the bulk aspect of the work. You may be able to negotiate it lower that way.

 

It's a little more complicated than that. Keep in mind, a lot of people on a webmaster forum aren't native English speakers, but they run sites targeting people who are. They hire writers because they can't write the content well enough themselves in the language, but at the same time they may not be comfortable enough with the language themselves to really know a high quality piece from garbage.

And then there's the other group that doesn't care about readers; they just want something that passes copyscape and nothing more. Personally, I have zero respect for people like that who litter the Web with nothing but crap, but hey, to each his own.

 

Buyers make a lot of inaccurate assumptions about a writer's business. They then base their ideas of compensation on these inaccurate assumptions.

You're assuming the writer is going to churn out 3 articles/hour just because you did and that the writer is going to spend 7 hours a day working on your project. Both are most likely wrong.

Asking someone to mill out 70 articles in a week is absurd, plain and simple. Most writers have other clients, other deadlines, and a freelance writing business to run. They simply cannot spend an entire week focusing solely on a single client's project.

Buyers complain about getting crap writing when they only pay $3/article, then complain about the "high" prices of more qualified writers. You can't have it both ways. You don't get good writing at cheap prices. You can either save money or get quality. Or, if you think the job can be done so easily, you can always do it yourself.

This is why I don't actively seek out new clients on DP. The people I work with on DP are either referred to me or find me through my forum posts. These people typically respect my rates and don't try to barter for lower rates because of their own assumptions.

 

Regardless of how their day breaks down it's still going to be the same amount of total hours spent.

It's not as if I had any time limit mentioned, if someone came to me and said they could get it done across 2 weeks or a month that's something that would be taken into consideration when hiring that person, ie do I need it within a certain timeframe or can it be spaced out.

I don't need to know what the rest of their time is spent doing. They can do other customers work or go to the zoo, the above was just illustrative of how long I think a project would take in man hours.

Well there's a balance between quality and cost that has to be struck in any aspect of business. I consider myself to be a reasonable writer with a good knowledge in my field, yet I effectively earn about $2 per 100 words base (other hats aside). I live in London and have a reasonable standard of living, so to my mind paying somebody much more than that seems excessive.

As mentioned though I do appreciate the difference between a researched article and what I wanted in this case.

Well our assumptions are all we really have to go with until it's explained. It's not as if the process is transparant. You could be sitting in your home eating ice-cream and playing video games having knocked up an article in ten minutes and delaying handing it over so we think you've spent longer on it (not that I'm saying that's what happens, especially since none of the jobs are by the hour). See my previous paragraph for why I would barter rates.

I'm by no means arguing that some articles or writers aren't worth that I'm just trying to giver an opposing view point.

Another thing that I thought of is that other people using this forum are people who are creating projects as an aside to their main job, so cannot afford to pay a full time wage (or indeed more than my full time wage ) to somebody else.

In fact I would imagine this forum to have more of this type of person (it's how I found it) than people who want to use it professionally. There are other forums/sites for projects utilising all kinds of skill sets where I think a company would go before here, which is no insult to people who come here.

So aside from how this forum started, as webmaster tips and advice, it's built up to be a place where people with ideas and spare time projects come and look for people to fill whatever skill gap they have in seeing their idea through.

Part of that is content and some peoples ideas are to provide content to others. If anything I would digital point should have people who want to provide low cost content.

There are still those that expect something for nothing, but I wouldn't necessarily condemn everybody who is looking for a $3 article writer.

Anyway, I keep forgetting what my points are by the time I write them, football's on

 

I assume that your job is full-time? Most likely you also get benefits, perhaps medical coverage, dental, some kind of retirement option, sick days, time off with pay (vacation), etc.

A freelance writer gets none of those and that is why any professional writer worth a damn will have a higher price. They don't enjoy the luxury of being able to call in sick and get a day with pay.

Your analogy of putting a writer on the clock to see how fast they turn in their work works both ways. Are you spending your work time surfing the net and posting on Digital Point?

 

I don't condemn everybody who hires writers at $3/article. I have a problem when those people then decide to rant, rave and complain about the quality of those articles.

As Latoya mentioned - you CANNOT have it both ways. You either pay peanuts for shoddy content or pay an established professional substantially more for an article that doesn't look like it was written by an 8 year old.

Professional writers charge more because they are worth it, plain and simple. Their talent and experience warrants it.

 

But buyers do need to understand how a writer's time is spent when it comes to pricing. If you were working a full-time job making $20 per hour for a 40-hour work week, you'd be coming into a relationship with a freelancer with a pretty skewed perspective. Here's why:

If we use those numbers (b/c it's not an uncommon situation, whether or not it's yours personally), you're earning $800 / week. For a freelance writer (one who's responsible in running their business at least), only half of their hours worked are actually billable (a little over that, but we'll say 20 hours billable just for the sake of simplifying the numbers). That means that their billable hours have to account for the full 40 hours worked. That's just reality.

Therefore, for a writer to make the same amount as you, they actually have to bill out their time at $40 per hour to get the same take-home pay that you're getting.

But wait... it gets worse. Freelancers (at least in the US) also have to pay additional taxes through the self-employment tax (where they not only pay the same medicare and SS taxes as employees, but they also have to pay double - the "employee" and "employer" halves are both their responsibility). No matter where they are, they also incur business expenses. They may not look high for writers, but they really do add up through the year - domain name and hosting for their business site, design work for that if they can't do it themselves, their own insurance costs are entirely in their hands, utilities (even if at home a portion are considered business expenses), travel for meetings if they take them, basic office supplies, if they want retirement savings, that's all in their hands, etc.... all the things an employee takes for granted comes out of the pay directly from these freelancers.

When you factor it all in, your $20 per hour would be much closer to $50-60 per hour billed to a freelance writers' clients (for them to be earning an equivalent "take home" pay and benefits), which is something most new freelancers get wrong as well (hence why so many undercharge and then burn out and turn in shoddy work when they can't make it happen anymore).

You have to keep it all in perspective. Is a writer's time worth as much as yours? Sure it is... in some cases it may be worth significantly more than yours depending on their niche, experience, expertise, marketing ability, etc. $50-60 / hr is the real equivalent to what you're making. Writers charging significantly less are usually being very irresponsible in the actual long-term running of their business (aside from those who honestly live somewhere where there's a huge difference in the cost of living - but in those cases, don't count on getting a native English writer). For them to do that, they either are neglecting their marketing and administrative duties (setting themselves up to fail) or they're working longer hours overall to make a manageable income that others can do with a normal work week (setting themselves to eventually burn out and hate their job).

I hope that helps to clear up a pretty common misconception among buyers of freelance writing.

 

Any niche expert can easily churn out 15 quality words a minute or more. I can write a 500-wd article in a matter of minutes if it is related to my specialties (parenting and home, occasionally business), but I'd be sorely pressed to write more than a word a minute if I were trying to prepare something on HTML or Linux...

The fact that I know my subject so well means I can charge a premium - this is a perfect example of why specialization is the key in freelance writing.

Rebecca

 

Hi guys, just read through the entire thread and I've got a quick question/favor to ask.

I'm a college student who enjoys writing articles part time and I had quite a bit of orders over the past month but I kind of lost interest in writing as it seemed like I was hardly making any money. I was charging .01 per word and was wondering if someone could maybe advise me on how much to charge for articles or per word - I'll send a sample or two of previous work so you can take a look and let me know.

Thanks!

 

I've provided a basic formula for setting freelance writing rates on my writing forums - near the bottom I recently added the solutions for some common income goals. The post details the types of things you'll need to consider.

 

Yeah, course I do On the flip side though I regularly work late and weekends to make up for the time doing it which I don't get overtime for. I get sick pay should I be off and paid vacation, none of the rest though

Yeah, great explanation

 

$3 lol read below

i read all that post and had to giggle when i looked at your sig

 

I have to say that you have all (and by you I mean Denise, Internet Author, and jhmattern) made wonderful points. The problem seems to lie with new writers. What I mean is this, I have just recently, within the last few months, begun my writing career, and it's a long time dream come true for me. The trouble is that I am just now beginning to get myself established as a writer, and I have written for 1c per word, actually I've written for less when I first started. Setting rates is very confusing for someone who is totally new to writing, and after they have been set, it is very difficult to raise them. I do agree that some buyers on DP don't expect to pay much. I have had several tell me that 3c per word is too high. I have also found very good clients who pay well and appreciate what I give them. I would love to raise my rates, my problem is not knowing if my writing is as good as to be called professional. I have had good reviews for the work that I've done on DP and a few other places, I have a blog that gets semi-decent traffic, and I publish my own articles, too. But, when you are new and fairly unestablished, it's hard to really know what rates are expected and when you can raise them.

 

She's advertising for PLR article packs - a lot different than standard articles Sammie. Believe me... her standard rates are not that low and surpass even what I charge.

 

Denise is right. Visit the link before judging it. I'm pushing them to get rid of them, b/c I'm stopping that service completely next year... just using language that may appeal to the webmasters in the market for such things. The minimum I charge for unique articles, other than blog posts, is $200 a pop. Right now I'm just more interested in "cleaning house" by selling as many copies of the PLR packs as I can before I pull them completely.

Remember, we were all "totally new to writing" at one point too. The beginning struggles aren't lost on us. Most of us have made mistakes in setting rates along the way, and we're trying to help those newer writers now to avoid those same pitfalls. If you set your rates effectively in the beginning to truly account for what you need and want to make, you won't fall into the trap of struggling later to raise them.

If $.03 per word is what you need to account for personal expenses, business expenses, taxes, etc. based on a realistic number of billable hours, then the clients who tell you that's too high don't matter. They're not in your target market. Your target market has to have as much to do with your rates as your niche or any other factor.

 

some great writers here, and some wonderful resources.

I typically write pc/tech related articles for a popular G4\cyber type website (that I prefer NOT to give free promo to) , geared towards the novice. Some perks include product samples, however no $$$. Anyone care to share some marketing companies that may have a need for this type of content? Product samples don't pay the bills

thx

 

Thank you so much, you have wonderful advice. It seems that my problem is being afraid of rejection, for instance if my rates are too high, then I'm afraid I might run out of work

Anyway, I will be looking into my rates for new customers, and by the way, your forum is wonderful. I registered and I am there looking around now. It is filled with useful information and such wonderful and helpful members.
Thanks so much