I think most brick and mortar business operators would be stunned to know how much written material is required for an online business enterprise. Using the Internet for profit purposes requires an immense amount of content. Whether we rely heavily on video or the written word, every utterance or sentence must be carefully crafted.
Your website is often the first contact a prospect has with your company. While website design and your actual product or service are essential, the quality of the presentation of your words will have a huge impact upon the lingering impressions that your prospects have of your company. Therefore, you must be certain that the writers who are doing the work are the best that you are able to afford. This is no place to pinch pennies.
Some businesses are large and diverse operations that choose to handle almost every task within one of the company’s departments. Many of us, on the other hand, do not have the time or, perhaps the in-house talent to meet all of the writing needs that we have. A great many Internet marketers choose to out-source the authoring to professionals–or to whom they hope will be professionals. There are many free lance authors and web article writing services available.
Out-sourcing writing can be a wise investment for most firms. Before you accept a writing service or individual author, however, take time to be sure that they have some reasonable understanding of the unique requirements of online businesses. Here are a few things to check:
1) Any writer should be properly trained, of course. Equally important is that the author is naturally fluent in the language of your target market. For example, I grew up primarily in the United States. I speak a couple of other languages, however, I would hire a British writer to at least edit my work if I were writing exclusively for a target market in the U.K. While we write (and speak) the same language, the idioms, slang and many casual expressions are very different.
2) No writer can be expected to be an expert in every subject. However, you need to determine whether the writer who is going to write for you has the ability to quickly learn what is necessary about the subject to be able to write about that topic in an engaging manner.
3) They must be able to write conversationally for the web. Writing for most Internet venues is very different from writing for an academic journal or composing a report for school.
4) They must undertand the purposes of the article. If it will be published on your website, the article may have a very different purpose than if it is to be distributed for article marketing purposes. The former deals with a reader who has already found your site, while the latter is designed to attract visitors to your site.
5) Finally, the writers should not be confounded if you mention that they should optimize for a specific long tail key phrase. They ought to have some understanding of what SEO actually is.
All of these issues are more important to consider than whether an article costs you $10, $30 or even $100. Ten poor articles do not have the impact on your long term profits that one very good piece of prose will have.
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