CONTENT MARKETING
WHY CHEAP CONTENT WRITERS WILL COST YOUR BUSINESS
A friend and senior freelance content writer with a decade of experience was offered 50 paise a word, by an internationally funded Indian agency for “bulk assignments.
She had more clients and self-respect than most content writers in this country and so turned it down.
Time and again I’ve been told by prospective clients that I’m too “expensive” even when they spend the same hourly rate for a luxury Urbanclap massage.
What amuses me isn’t employers' sheer disrespect for content writers – but the oblivion that cheap content writers are catastrophic for YOUR business.
Here are three ways this proves to be true.
1. Good content marketing is expensive
As a business owner or marketing head, I understand you have budgets to manage. But good content marketing IS expensive.
The percent of marketing budget between effective content marketers vs. the least effective content marketers is 14% and 40% — according to research by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.
That is a significant gap.
Hate to burst your bubble, but that difference is seen in the kind of results that content marketing then gets.
2. Pay for the brain drain
‘This Is Your Brain In Writing’ published in the New York Times, cites research that shows professional writers change the way their brain works while writing – we become language-oriented, thinking more in words than novice writers’ brains that think in pictures.
This might not require a five-year degree but does require years of training for the brain to re-wire itself when writing.
Good content writers feel the ‘brain drain’ when they exert their minds to write well and they charge you for it. Along with the additional time required for inspiration and edits.
Which is far higher than the time and effort required for churning quick fluff.
3. Re-writing costs more
Cheap writers may be compelled by appalling market rates to bend but many of them agree because they’re outsourcing the writing to freshers or AI tools like Chat GPT, WITHOUT spending time cleaning those copies later.
Or worse, they aren’t writers themselves. Business owners give me the highest volume of work when they hire designers, marketing consultants, or other office staff to do the writing and then need the resulting nightmare to be re-written.
Which proves to be far more expensive. It takes me more time to undo somebody else’s shabby thought process than just write with my own clarity.
Don’t assume the time and effort required to write a project – it takes up to 7-10 hours to write a well-researched blog post of 1000 words tbh.
You wouldn’t need a good writer if you were more accurate with those calculations.
Instead, ask your writer for a clear break-up of the estimated time they will spend on each aspect of your content project.
Also, that's me holidaying in Italy, because my clients get their money's worth.
This blogpost was first published here.
BASED IN MUMBAI, INDIA
WORKING WORLDWIDE
IST LOCAL TIME:
Thu 03:07 am