Outsourcing Your Article Writing

Writing and publishing articles is a great way to promote your website. Well written, informative articles relevant to your particular niche not only attract real visitors to your site, but are also great for the purposes of search engine optimisation (SEO). Google loves content, it’s that simple. Actually, Google loves relevant content and consequently writing articles related to your site is a great way of improving your position in the search engine listings.

But what if you don’t have time to write lots of articles or what if writing doesn’t come that naturally to you? The simple answer is to hire someone else to do it for you. I’m currently in the middle of a dedicated period of optimisation for my wedding insurance comparison and wedding seating plan websites and don’t really have the time to write lots of articles myself. So I thought I’d try hiring someone else to write them for me.

Googling “article writing service” returns lots of results with a variety of prices too – from as low as $5 per article up to around $50. Firstly I tried someone towards the top end of the scale at $40 for a 500 word article. A week after I’d sent the initial spec (this one was actually for a topic other than wedding insurance) an email dropped in with my article attached. I was very pleased with the results – it was a well written and well researched article. However, at $40 a go, I wasn’t going to be able to afford to get many articles written for me!

Next I tried the lower end of the scale - $5 an article. A few days later I received the articles. As expected, they weren’t quite the same quality as the $40 one. Far from it actually. I’d anticipated that for this price the writers would probably be non-native English speakers and that I’d probably need to make a few grammatical corrections but this would be much quicker than writing the articles from scratch. However, whilst the author had clearly researched the topic well, the language used was pretty dreadful. I’ve since read on forums that it is possible to find authors who can write fantastic articles for just $5 a go but it appears they are possibly few and far between.

Finally I discovered UK based Justin Arnold’s website The Mightier Pen. It seemed to offer exactly what I was looking for, well written articles at a reasonable price. I ordered a 10 article package on wedding insurance and a few days later the articles arrived. The quality was superb – highly relevant to the topic and extremely well written. At $15 per article it’s certainly great value. I’ve since placed another order and as soon as budget allows I’ll be asking Justin to write some more for me.

If you decide to go down the route of outsourcing your article writing there are a few things you should watch out for, irrespective of who you get to write your articles.

• Once you’ve made payment you should own the copyright to the article.
• They must pass a Copyscape test – you don’t want to be publishing content that’s not original.
• Articles should be manually written and not automatically produced using software.
• Articles should be written to include plenty of relevant keywords. That said, you don’t want your article completely stuffed with keywords either.