Mean Old Scene

OK - having jumped into the outsourcing of writing content for my site it was interesting to get the results back. I placed a project on Get A Freelancer and, having got 18 bids, went with a freelancer that had good feedback (they are quite new so had not got a huge number of reviews) based in Ontario. Have to say it was very difficulty to know on what basis to choose from of the bidders - made me realise that there is a bit of trial and error in all this.

The copy that I had back from the lady in Ontario was, in my opinion, excellent - it was a lot better than I could have done (admittedly not hard!) and the turnaround speed was incredibly fast. So - methinks - I am on to a winner here.

I then went back to Get A Freelancer with a project for a different site I am working on but with a very similar brief to my first attempt. Again I got a lot of bids - 19 I think - so had plenty of choice. Because of the success of using somebody from the American continent, who has English as their mother tongue, I went with a bid from a lady in the USA. Quite frankly it has been less than impressive. I had to ask her to redo elements of the first lot of text she sent through - that was OK. Then the remaining text just has not turned up - no communication. Nothing.

We are not in a huge hurry for this text so I have not chased it up yet but nevertheless this is pretty shoddy and not what we are looking for in the longer term.

So - my conclusions based on this limited experience are…

• Write a thorough brief for the freelancer - this will ensure you get what you want and give confidence to freelancers that they are dealing with professional buyer which, in turn, leads to more bids
• Don’t assume that using a freelancer who has English as their mother tongue will guarantee quality writing
• Choose a freelancer that has at least some track-record and check their reviews
• Agree how payment will be made from the beginning
• Treat freelancers fairly - they are only human!
• Communicate with the freelancer and explain what you want in as much detail as possible
• Ask for a portion of the work to be done first which you can then check and provide guidance before the freelancer does all the work
• Check the text in Copyscape - it is very cheap and could save a lot of hassle in the future
• Pay the freelancer as soon as the work has been finished and checked
• Give feedback via the freelancing website.

If there are any other tips for successfully outsourcing copywriting please let me know - I am still rather new to this!

I have signed up with GetAFreelancer. It is a slighty strange process to register - they have a single form for both ’sellers’ and ‘buyers’ which I found very confusing at first - but other than that it seems to be pretty easy to use.

I don’t know why, but I got quite nervous posting my first project on the site. Bit of the unknown I guess and not being exactly sure what to say and all that. Anyway - wrote a nice description of what we need (20 product reviews to be researched and written - 300 words each) and hit the ‘go’ button.

I then thought I would tidy up before heading off home and see if anybody had placed a bid in the morning - in the time it took me to wash up my coffee mug I had got 5 proposals!! These guys must be sitting there clicking the ‘refresh’ button on GetAFreelancer and waiting for the next project to appear.

The average price is around $60 - that is $3 per product review - that is £1.50 each!! The feedback on most of the bidders is excellent so this is looking pretty good to me.

Now I’m getting nervous again - is this all too cheap? Is it going to be a complete waste of time with a load of rubbish text? Or is this the way forward?

I’m thinking (and hoping) it is the latter.

We (I am referring to my small web development company)  have actually been dabbling with Affiliate Marketing for a number of years now but with lots of good work coming in from corporate clients wanting us to build them websites we have never found the time to really make a go of it. The thing we found we have never had time for is creating content. Researching and writing words takes time - lots of time - and as we all have other things to do in our lives we have not had that valuable time to do this affiliate marketing thing properly.

This brings me on to the recent A4U Expo held in London’s Excel Centre. It was an excellent event again (I went last year too) and I will write about the different sessions in other posts.

However, the session that gave me most inspiration was Million Dollar Blogging Strategies by Al Carlton. Al runs a very very successful website called Coolest Gadgets. Among the many pearls of wisdom that Al gave during his presentation was the point that he outsources all of his content writing. All of it.

At that moment the penny dropped - this is where we have been going wrong for all these years. While we have been building websites for other companies and complaining that this meant we have no time to write on our handful of affiliate sites we could have outsourced all the writing to a freelancer.

So the mission now is to look at some freelancing websites and see how this whole thing works. GetAFreelancer and eLance - here I come!