Hiring a writer - Cost vs Quality
A few months ago I posted on a forum that I was looking for some authors for BloggingTips. I didn’t find anyone at that time so I put it to the side until Mark from 45n5 posted about how he is hiring a writer for one of his blogs, this inspired me to get off my lazy ass and get something done about it. Most of the writers I contacted were quoting a few hundred dollars a month for posting so I was a bit skeptical at first when Mark assured me that you could get good writers for $5 per post. I was of the opinion that a price so low would not get you a good writer, hopefully I’m proved wrong!
I’ve talked about BloggingTips being a multi author blog many times but I hadn’t actually taken many steps to reach that goal. I contacted a few writers yesterday, posted an ad on the Pro Blogger jobs board and I checked out some content related sites so I’ve at least got the ball rolling. I may check out eLance too though in my experience that can be hit or miss (but I probably won’t need to, I got my first response from my ad on Pro Blogger within 20 minutes!).
One of the sites I came across was called Get Me Content (via sitepoint).
Get me Content
The site offers you a few content options but the one which grabbed my attention was the offer of a full time writer for your site for $250 per month.
* Your own dedicated staff writer working in our central office
* Direct content input into your blog or CMS
* 24 hour access to your personal account manager
* Full editorial control over your copy
* 1000 words per day (5 blog articles or news stories)
* Full ownership of your material
Fantastic, just what I’m looking for I thought….well I thought for a minute until my skepticism returned. Specifically the part which they state they can provide five 200 word articles every day for a month.
So in a 30 day month the writer would be getting around $1.67 per post! This is the same kind of silly offer which was promised by the ‘pay for comments‘ site.
I did a little more research on the site and found that the service is run by a Scottish lad called Lee Bandoni. It appears that he is running the website himself which leads me to the conclusion that he is either (a) Paying other people to do this work or (b) Knowledgable about every subject in the world!
The fact this site is run by someone who lives 15 miles from me made me question the service even more. $1.67 per post is £0.82 in UK pounds. The UK is one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in (the low US dollar isn’t helping those who make a living through the web either!). The British minimum wage for someone 22 years or older is £5.35 per hour so someone living in the UK would have to write 6.5 posts per hour just to make the same wage as a toilet cleaner in a stinky pub!
I did a quick check and found a few posts about the service from people who have used it :
- Sammy from My Adsense Guide seems pretty happy with the 30 articles he got for $99 but he doesn’t mention what topic the articles were covered. I get the impression the articles were specifically for a ‘made for adsense’ content site and he would have been happy with pretty much anything.
- Tyler Cruz wrote a good review about it on July 25th 2007. I don’t think that Tyler actually used the service but he seems to have the same opinion as me.
Readers should bear in mind at this point that I have not used this websites services. My opinion on this website is solely based on the price of the offer and what is promised. Infact, I would probably have been interested in the service if it was more expensive! The owner posted about Tyler’s review on his blog and he seems to have taken the criticism well. However, until they can provide more real life examples of the posts you will get and until this service has been tested by a lot more people I would stay well clear unless you are just looking for low quality content for a ‘made for adense’ type site.
Hiring a writer - Cost vs Quality
I have strayed from my original topic slightly in this post but I thought that it was best to use a real life example to illustrate the dilemma which bloggers face when looking for writers. If you have made the decision to pay someone to write some posts for your blog then you will at one point be faced with this dilemma, someone will quote a price which is way above what you want to pay and someone else will give you a price which makes you question what sort of quality you will receive for your money.
I have always been of the opinion that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. However, I do realise that the average price per post will be different for some blogs blogs and for different topics etc. For example, I doubt I would receive good quality posts if I was to pay $5 per post at Blogging Tips but if I had to start a blog which focused on World of Warcraft or Counter Strike I would probably be looking to pay that. To me the reason for this is clear, I would be happy with 14 year old bloggers for a gaming blog but for Blogging Tips I am looking to get writers with years of experience in blogging and web development.
One other big factor when hiring a writer is your budget. It’s not always the case but generally speaking you should be getting better posts with the more money you are paying out. If you have a really good budget you might be able to get someone who is well known in your blogs field, it’s sometimes worth paying that little bit extra for a known writer or blogger as they can generate extra traffic for your blog and raise the profile of it at the same time.
I’d love to hear from bloggers who have went through this before. Did you find a good writer at a bargain basement price or did you have to pay through the nose to get the quality you required?
I will be speaking with a lot of writers in the next week regarding posting at Blogging Tips so I will give you all an update on how I get on in a week or so.
Cash Quests | August 7th, 2007 at 8:31 am #
I doubt that the content is actually being written in the UK. Lee probably outsources the content creation to India where you can easily pick up content for $1.67 per post.
45n5 | August 7th, 2007 at 8:31 am #
thanks for the mention and good luck with the writer search. I’m guessing you will have your best luck with the problogger job board, but just a guess so look forward to the update.
cooliojones | August 7th, 2007 at 9:31 am #
The problem with India is that a lot of those people do not speak good enough English to write a whole post. They usually use something canned or old hackneyed phrases that here cool years ago.
Lee Bandoni | August 7th, 2007 at 10:00 am #
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the review which provides me with valuable feedback to help us improve our service.
To clear things up GMC is based outside the UK and we have just taken over a 10,000 sq ft office for our new writing HQ. The new office is kitted out with brand new hardware and is the home to our internal research servers which provide our staff with fresh information on any subject.
I really hope people are happy with what we have created and I welcome any feedback at : lee@bandoni.net .
Kevin | August 7th, 2007 at 10:04 am #
Hi Lee,
So is the work being outsourced to workers in a less developeed country? I’m just curious as to how you can offer the work at such a low price.
Do you offer any sort of quality gurantee when someone orders
Kevin
Lee Bandoni | August 7th, 2007 at 10:28 am #
Hi Kevin,
We own and operate our own offices which mean we can control the quality of the material we produce. Each article written is proofread by an editor and only then is it sent out to the client.
All our staff are university trained and 95% have degrees in English literature which means they write good stuff
J.D. | August 7th, 2007 at 12:12 pm #
I can definately see how that would be a good service for someone who was writing something simple and quick…Maybe something with basic news on a particular niche? Could they write a believable opinion piece?
What does a guy making $1.67 a post know about audio-visual equipment? Is he just copying or re-writing material from another site?
Regardless of how educated the Indians are that are writing this material, I think it would be pretty easy to spot the work they do when you compare it to the work someone does when they’re passionate about their site and topic.
Whether that would be enough to turn off your average joe reader who might click your adsense ads, I don’t know.
Lee Bandoni | August 7th, 2007 at 1:44 pm #
J.D.
We have a large number of writers and the beauty of our service is that we can match writers to topics they care about. We also have in-house research systems and get first hand information from manufacturers etc which means we have very fresh material to work from.
The $250 is a special price for the summer (normally $499) which we will be changing when GMC 2.0 is live
I would also point out we have customers making $5000 a day using our writers & organic search and in my opinion its worth its weight in gold!
AruntheACE | August 7th, 2007 at 5:59 pm #
hiring freelancers is better than this.
Chris Stark | August 7th, 2007 at 6:18 pm #
Hey Kevin,
One option you might not be thinking of is outsourcing only the research for articles. I don’t do it myself (I only have one blog that posts slowly) but I’ve heard that some people use this kind of help and are pretty happy with it.
Basically, the idea is instead of paying for an article, you pay someone to do all the research you need to write it yourself.
So, for example if you wanted to do an article on all the different advertising options out there, instead of manually looking for hours and compiling the list yourself, you pay someone 5-10 bucks an hour to research for you…
Might be an idea for some people.
Kevin | August 7th, 2007 at 6:25 pm #
Hi Chris,
It might work with some topics but not for others. I wouldn’t pay for something like that for Blogging Tips because the time I spend reviewing the work isn’t much less than the same time I would spend doing it myself. Maybe it would be useful if I was incredibly swamped. I wouldn’t mind hearing from someone who has tried it though…I don’t mind being proven wrong if it saves me time and money haha
Chris Stark | August 7th, 2007 at 6:32 pm #
Yeah, I agree. I think stuff like this would only really work with specific types of articles. Here, a lot of the stuff you talk about is from your personal experiences specifically when it comes to how people might apply your suggestions to their own blog.
Would be tough to find a ghost writer on that, unless they were doing what you’re doing, and in that case, they must be writing a blog themselves already
I was thinking more for articles that require 90% research 10% writeup, like the example I used about a list of advertising sites or something like a list of font resources or free web hosting companies.
Posts that don’t really require much personal experience to write, it’s mostly research.
Darren | August 7th, 2007 at 8:51 pm #
glad to see you’re getting some results already with the job board - let me know how you find it and if you get too many applications as I can always mark the job as filled.
Kevin | August 7th, 2007 at 8:59 pm #
Thanks Darren. Too many applications is not a bad thing in my opinion! I’ve had close to a dozen emails since posting the ad last night. So far I’ve got two people to jump on board. Some were a bit too pricey for my budget whilst others did not have the experience I was looking for or wanted to cover topics I don’t need covered.
All in all I have been incredibly pleased with it. The best $50 I’ve spent in a while, it will definately be the first place I go to find new bloggers in the future.
Electronics reviews | August 7th, 2007 at 10:47 pm #
I used to write blog posts at one time for $5…then I realized what they were doing and now I’m playing their game
TextAdSearch | August 8th, 2007 at 12:18 am #
My concern too would be the style of writing. In India they have a certain accent/way of speaking that would come through in any post.
For opinion/personal tyoe blogs this wouldn’t work.
For more general blogs the service probably would.
Shypy | August 8th, 2007 at 10:50 am #
Seems like the scottish fella is outsourcing work that has been outsourced to him - a good money spinner if you have decent marketing skills :p
PS: Kevin, why dont you install the “nested comments” plugin - makes commenting a lot more fun
Kevin | August 8th, 2007 at 11:42 am #
Shypy - I installed it months ago but I just didn’t update the comments.php file
I’ll sort it out in the next few days 
Sara | August 8th, 2007 at 3:31 pm #
VERY good post Kevin.
Andy | August 8th, 2007 at 4:05 pm #
If you take a look at Get Me Content’s examples you can clearly tell that they are outsourced from India. For example, an article on how to wash hair:
Then the hair should be put in the towel as a turban but; and when removing it, the hair should be pat dry and not rubbed dry.”
http://www.getmecontent.com/example-article.html
The articles are workmanlike, and I suppose they are useful if you are looking for low quality text to fill pages, but that’s about it.
The thing that surprised me most, though, is that the example post that this company is putting up to show off its work had some pretty straightforward grammatical errors in it.
The travel pdfs they show off as examples, it has to be said, are much better. The few facts I double checked in the Estonia report seemed accurate. The writing was workmanlike, but it could be polished quite quickly and turned into a relatively professional product.
Justin Boyce | August 14th, 2007 at 6:16 pm #
I purchased this package $99 via sitepoint forums
this was on the 29th of July here I am still waiting for my package to arrive I talked with Lee on the phone who said everything would get sorted that was Saturday here I am now 5 days later and still nothing.
I have put this into dispute with paypal Lee said they have some problems with a lot of orders and changing site etc and that all will be fixed I’m yet to see it.
Keith | September 2nd, 2007 at 6:41 pm #
I have used their service and was completely burned. partial content, no communication and the quality was a joke. I urge you guys to find another quality service for your writing needs cause you won’t find it with getmecontent
Kevin | September 2nd, 2007 at 7:06 pm #
Justin/Keith - I am sory to hear about you guys getting burned by this guy. I was suspicious of this site from the start. I’m still a believer that if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is
Go To Rocky Point | August 29th, 2008 at 11:19 pm #
This site is so interesting and the writtings are important to me and essential. I see that the author of the writtings makes sense to me because all of the post are interesting and fun to read. The style of writting is so original and unique thats why it capture my attention. I will visit this site more often or I am sure everyday…
