When Is It Time To Hire a Freelance Writer?

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Everyone that has ever broken into the online business world has at one point felt a bit overwhelmed by the amount of content creation required to keep your website relevant on the web.

Constantly writing new posts or articles every single day can be time consuming and take you away from a lot of important things in life.

Even the word count required to make your content relevant in the search engines can be a constant uphill battle. Consistently producing 1500+ word articles can really take its toll on even the most seasoned website writers.

At some point, one has to wonder “when is it time to hire a freelance writer?”

There’s a lot that goes into hiring a freelance writer, and you don’t want to make the decision to do so too early…or too late for that matter.

Let’s talk about some of the key metrics that scream you’re not quite ready to hire a freelance writer.

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Key Signs It’s Too Early To Hire A Freelancer

In order to decide when it is the right time to hire a freelance writer, you first need to understand the opposite.

There are quite a few signs out there that you just aren’t ready yet, you wouldn’t want to make the fatal mistake that many bloggers and affiliate marketers make and hire someone prematurely.

This can dig into profit margins, and better yet can potentially put you in the negative very quickly.

So what are the key signs it’s still too early?

1. You don’t yet understand the basics of your website:

Building a successful and profitable online business through content creation is not always a simple task.

There is a lot to doing such a thing and it takes hours upon hours of learning and ultimately creating your own content to understand what really attracts readers and converts.

You must first understand the basics of building your own website.

This includes knowing how to acquire and build out a domain and the framework of your website. It also means narrowing down a niche for your website, and developing some quality content as a basis for the rest of your posts and articles.

If you don’t first put in the effort to understand your site, you may not realize it when you receive content back from a freelancer that will blatantly not convert to sales.

You might also be deviating from the general tone of your website and once again not realize that’s the case.

If you also don’t know how to edit or update the appearance of your website, create visually or aesthetically pleasing articles, or more importantly how to format posts so that they rank and allow you to ultimately make sales, you could be selling yourself short if you hire a freelancer.

Without understanding the basics of your website, you may not be able to establish a clear cut formula for what converts.

Without understand what converts in your niche, you are leaving sales on the table.

This means that you won’t be paying your freelancer with profits from the rest of your works.

Instead you will be digging deeper and deeper into your own pocket and taking a bigger and bigger business loss every day.

Anyone who understands business and online business in particular knows that trying to force it early on can be the demise of that business in the long run.

This holds true with social media and PPC advertising as well as it does here with outsourcing content development.

2. You’re not in the black just yet:

So let’s say that you’re a seasoned affiliate marketer, you have a steady stream of sales coming in, but you feel like you are finding less and less time to write.

This happens to everyone at some point when attempting to build an online business.

Even with a steady stream of sales, however, you may not be making a profit just yet.

A large driver for creating your very own online business is creating a side (or full time) income with low or no cost up front. If you wanted to sink hundreds or thousands of dollars in capital into a business, you may as well go with traditional brick and mortar, E-commerce, or Retail Arbitrage style businesses.

These style businesses of course eat a ton of capital up front and can leave you in the red for months if not years. Most of these businesses (around 97% of them) fail miserably.

Don’t believe me? Click here to read about my experiences with Shopify and Retail Arbitrage.

So, don’t make the same mistakes that are easy to make in those industries as an affiliate marketer or blogger.

If you start shelling out your own money and putting in capital to grow your business through content creation, remember that you can likely keep creating content yourself and that sweat equity has the best payout over time.

The bottom line is that even when you are making sales, you likely have overhead costs to deal with first.

These costs can be graphic design costs, web hosting fees, or PPC and advertising costs that you’ve already put forth.

Unless you are clearly making money and are net positive with each new article, you should not yet be hiring a freelancer because ideally you will use these future profits as the resource for paying the freelancer.

3. You Don’t Yet Have A Trusted Network Of Service Providers

Hiring service providers of any sort for your website is complicated.

It takes a great deal of time to track down the right people and vet them for quality. A freelance writer needs to be screened and provide you with proper examples of their work in order to be a realistic option.

If you spend too much time seeking out a freelancer or service provider too early on in your website’s history, you may be hurting your SEO rankings and potential content development.

If you only have 20 posts on your website, any time wasted can seriously inhibit your ability to build trust with the different search engines.

A well established site with an abundance of quality content is the foundation to building a success affiliate marketing or internet marketing business. It can be tough, when you first start, to build this content.

However, you need to make sure that you don’t waste time early on overanalyzing ways to scale. This is not yet the scaling stage and you should be concerned about overall site health before shifting your focus.

The shifting of focus that occurs once you have maybe 100 quality posts on your site, with appropriate engagement and a significant amount of site trust established with Google, Bing, and Yahoo is indicative of success in this business.

That brings us to the next most important piece of the puzzle… understanding when it is the RIGHT time.

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So When Is Time To Hire A Freelancer?

Now that we fully understand when NOT to hire a freelancer, how do we know that we are okay to move forward with seeking out products and services that will help expand our business and ultimately become a well oiled money making machine?

Once again, time constraints come into play.

Time constraints because you are focused on social sharing, analyzing data, creating video content, and other heavy time related activities are the only appropriate reasons to start outsourcing content.

If you are time constrained strictly because you don’t want to sit down and write for an hour or two, then it’s likely you won’t put in the time and effort required to build out and scale your business successfully either.

These types of time constraints only show their face after you’ve established solid site health and built up trust with the search engines.

When your site is trusted, and you are maybe 6 months into consistently writing content, you will likely be close if not over the 100 post mark. This is a key milestone.

It means your content has a clearly developed path, you have related all your content to your niche with ease, and you understand exactly what the tone of your site is.

In addition, you will now probably have seen which articles have proven to be high converting articles and thus will know which articles are lacking.

These successful articles are the ones that you can make sure to emulate in the future, and you’ll want to confirm that whoever you hire to write your content for you emulates these successful articles as well.

When you finally are seeing profits from your website… this means generating income in excess of all the operating cost of your site including hosting, education, and design expenses.

At this point you simply take the profits you’ve received, and use these profits to hire your freelance writer.

Once you have a consistent stream of profit coming in and realize you are ready to start outsourcing content, you’ll need to know where to hire a trusted freelancer.

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Where To Hire A Freelance Writer

If you’re at the point where you believe you are ready to hire a freelance writer, you are probably wondering how to go about doing so.

There are a lot of places to hire a freelancer online.

You no longer have to put out a newspaper ad and hope that someone sees it in the coming weeks and responds.

The internet makes hiring freelance writers easier than ever.

The important thing is that you are looking out for scammy, unrenowned websites that don’t vet their freelancers or allow for user to review them. These same sites also don’t have money back guarantee clauses and in addition, they don’t have a support staff their to answer questions and ensure that your asks are being met by the freelancers you hire.

With all the different marketplaces out there that offer freelance service, how do you know which is the best?

Personally, I use Fiverr.

Fiverr is relatively cheap, I can often get articles written for around $20-50 each. If the freelancer knows what they are doing this amount of money is absolutely nothing because of the conversions and sales that will come from just one well keyworded unique article.

The last thing you want to do is hire someone who simply copy and pastes articles that they’ve written in the past that may relate to your topic with just a few edits.

If your content is not unique your overall site ranking will suffer tremendously in search engines and all of the hard work you’ve put into developing your site to be an authoritative figure in your niche will be all for not.

Make sure that whoever you are hiring has quality reviews and has the ability to communicate with you throughout the process of writing.

You should be able to clearly outline what you are looking for and also establish that time frame is not as important as quality.

The content you seek out should be easy to edit on the back end, should allow you to add photos and insert affiliate links conveniently and as needed.

The reason I lean towards linking and developing the aesthetics of your article independent of the freelancer’s actual writing is because you are able to make sure that it doesn’t become to gimmicky or salesy of a pitch.

You also know how to tastefully insert call to actions and click here now propoganda that converts and doesn’t cause users to deviate from reading your articles.

This is precisely why all the information included above about prematurely hiring a freelancer is so important.

You have to know what you are looking for, have well established guidelines, and be able to filter through quality content and junk.

Thankfully, places like Fiverr offer great insight into different writers and their skills, abilities, and past work.

So if you are looking to hire a freelancer, but don’t know where to start, I highly recommend Fiverr as a starting place. Once you establish a few good freelancers, you won’t have to look so hard for new trusted content sources.

Fiverr is a great place to find these resources and ideally you will be a return customer to quality individuals.

While there are other places out there like Writing Jobs Online, Fiverr is perhaps the most trusted brand name for website services in the industry.

Ready to hire your very own freelancer? Click the banner below and hire a Fiverr Freelance Writer today!

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Conclusion

There are some important take aways here.

First, you must not hire a freelance writer before you are truly ready and prepared. You will know you are prepared when you meet the criteria outlined in this article above.

Finally, don’t just hire a freelancer anywhere on the internet. Not all outlets can be trusted like Fiverr or other big name platforms. Often you will pay for crap content that will never convert or is just poorly written in the first place.

If you spend majority of your time editing a freelancer’s work, what is the purpose in hiring that freelance writer in the first place?

If you have any questions about freelancing, freelance writers, content, or building a website in general please leave me a comment below. If you want to connect with me further, need hosting services, or want to learn about affiliate marketing and creating an income generating blog, head over to Wealthy Affiliate and connect with me there.

Thanks for reading!

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