Creating fresh and original content for your website can be a big challenge to many small business owners because they have no time to write on a regular basis. It can be an even bigger challenge for people whose mother language is not English. The good news is that you can hire a freelance writer on eLance for your writing work.
ELance is one of the most reputable outsourcing sites. Headquartered in California, eLance has over 500,000 freelancers from all over the world with different expertise. In this blog, I will share with you how to find a good freelance writer on eLance.
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Your project description need to be specific, clear and attractive
The first step to hire a freelance writer on eLance is to post your job description. Like writing any job ad, you need to specify your requirements and expectation. Always explain them clearly and precisely because sometime you think it is a common sense but to people in other countries or cultures, it may be confusing. Here is an example for you:
“The articles should have compelling headlines with keywords provided. They should be 500-word long, well-structured, informative, easy to understand, free of grammatical mistakes and spelling mistakes.
The content will be checked on copyscape before payment is made. We will own all exclusive rights/copyrights to the completed articles.”
A good freelance writer prefers to bulk assignments. To make my project description attractive, I always emphasize in the end that I am looking for long- term cooperation and a larger assignment may be awarded based on the quality of this work.
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Set your budget range
It is important to set a budget range. Otherwise, you will get proposals way above your budget. It wastes the bidder’s time and your time as well. I had a job to rewrite a short sales letter. I did not put a budget in the project description. I ended up in having proposals ranging from $40 to over $1000. To avoid unrealistic expectation, set a reasonable budget in the job description. You can buy an article of 500 words around $4 to $10. A sales letter of the same length can be around $50 – 150.
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Select the right freelance writer
Once you post your job description, you will soon receive some proposals. You quickly go through all of them to select two to three candidates that you would like to scrutinize further. You can look at the freelance writer’s level, review rating, job history and skills. ELance levels represent contractors’ achievements and activities on Elance. Higher levels indicate greater activities, earnings, and positive reviews. All freelance writers start at Level 1, and move up to higher levels as they gain more experiences on Elance. I normally bypass bidders who are below level 5. The highest review rating is 5.0 while 4.8 or 4.9 are very good. The job history shows you how many clients the freelance writer has been working with and what are his or her customers’ feedback. The freelance writers are from different countries such as US, UK, Canada, India, Pakistan and Philippines, etc. For content writing, I prefer to choose a freelance writer from US, UK and Canada. Though they charge a higher rate, the quality is comparatively higher and there are less grammatical mistakes.
Freelance Writer Rating
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Prepare your keyword phrases and even headlines for your selected freelance writer
To get the best result from outsourcing article writing, I always prepare a list of keyword phrases and even the headlines for the freelance writer. I also ask the writer to send me the first two articles for review. In this way, I make sure that the freelance writer follows my guidelines and there is no surprise in the end.
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Use Escrow for payment
One of the advantages of using eLance is that you don’t pay the contractor directly. You allocate the fund to Escrow which holds the fund until you release it. Don’t release the fund before it is 100% completed.
Hiring a freelance writer on eLance is a great way to outsourcing your writing work. It is especially feasible and economical for small business owners. Fresh and original content not only increases traffic to your website but also helps you engage and convert prospects into your buyers. Welcome to share this blog with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Click on the image below to hire a freelance writer on eLance.
Hi, I’m Jamie – Director of Outreach at Scripted.com. Thank you so much for the tops. They were really helpful. For writers, we have a ton of paid work at the moment. For content buyers, we have flat-rate purchase options for blog posts, tweets, and other types of content! We hope you give our service a shot – You can reach me directly with any questions at jamie@scripted.com
Me too! I like the Elance structure and freaelnce jobs. Anybody wanting to do some online work at home should check out Elance.comI give them my highest recommendation.
These are good tips, but I’d add one more – Don’t say in the job description something like ‘keep in mind that we’re on a tight budget.’ Just set the budget like you said in the article.
Saying basically that you don’t have money to spend on the writer’s services makes you look cheap and unprofessional. No high quality writer is going to bid on a job description that says that. It would be like the writer saying, ‘The content I produce isn’t that good.’
Thanks for your input!
For article witring, there are many places to check out. The one I like the most for freelance work is Elance.com. Just sign up for their free service, it works just fine.
Great tips. I hire a lot of writers on Elance and Freelancer.
With Google tightening the screws on the quality of articles nowadays
Most of them don’t make the new and very stringent Google requirements for content. A lot are still stuck in their old ways of loading lots of content to mask the keywords instead of providing copy that is actually very current and helpful.
Have to continually test and test just to get the few who make the cut.
The Elance and Freelancer platforms don’t make very easy to filter the ones you want, e.g. by country, price range, experience, type of articles etc.
Hope they hear this!