Photo: PixabayYou’re the owner of an excellent landscaping company and you have a website to gather attention. No one expects you to be Shakespeare, since your talents lie in landscaping, but traffic to your site isn’t as high as it should be, and your blog is rather lackluster.
You need a writer to bring life to your website, through expertly written posts on your blog, which will create an interesting and professional look for your company, which potential customers will recognize and trust. But is a freelance writer (i.e. not in-house) right for your company?
Pros
Within your business, employees will generally be experts in landscaping. They won’t have the time or expertise to write blog posts, let alone format and upload them to your blog, but a freelance writer will have no qualms with any of this. Freelance writers are experts in the English language, who can devote themselves to their jobs.
If they don’t, however, then they don’t get paid – it’s as simple as that. An in-house employee still gets paid if they hand in terrible posts, but you can fire a freelance writer on the spot if they try to get away with subpar writing, and there is a large pool of alternative freelancers to choose from.
Finally, freelancers from outside of your business might be able to breathe fresh air into your marketing content – you’re an expert, so you may find yourself using words and details which an everyday person simply wouldn’t understand. This could alienate potential customers, who would otherwise become connected to your business and provide revenue for you.
To avoid this problem, a freelancer’s fresh perspective can make technical processes simpler and avoid unnecessary details which could create ‘cluttered’ and difficult-to-follow posts. So, freelance writers can be incredibly beneficial for your business.
Cons
However, you have to consider some of the difficulties that sometimes arise when dealing with freelancers. The other people within your business may not realize the importance of the freelance writer, and refuse to help with information for blog posts, which can frustrate both you – since posts may take longer or be of lesser quality – and your writer – since this leads to longer waits between payments and possibly several rewrites.
Also, you will have to put some effort in, since you can’t leave your freelancer to their own devices. They need focuses and information for blog posts, and a structured work plan if they end up being long-term. This means that, although you won’t have to actually plan and write out the posts, you will need to have some sort of idea of what you want each one to be about, and you will have to give your freelancer access to the information necessary to create the blog posts, which may mean that you have to educate your team on the importance of responding to the freelancer in a positive and constructive way, or create files with relevant information for your freelancer to browse through and utilize. Therefore, although hiring a freelancer is a lot less effort than writing the blog posts yourself, it isn’t a ‘work-free’ option.
What to look for – and where
If you’ve decided that a freelancer is the right fit for your landscaping company’s blog, then you’ll be wondering how to find the right fit for your blog. For every situation, there are a few pointers that you should follow: reliability (delivering regular content and replying to you promptly), cost (how much you’re prepared to set aside for the freelancer’s payment, and if that lines up with the freelancer’s expectations), ability (completing work to a satisfactory standard) and flexibility (willingness to adapt to your content and work around your schedule).
The better the ability of your chosen freelancer, the higher the price – there’s no getting around it. A 600-700 word blog post may cost you $100-$200, if the writer can create educational but exciting posts that will engage your audience and promote sales and customer loyalty. 1,200-1,400 word blog posts, at the same good quality, can cost you $200-$350, so you should take this into account when hiring your freelancer – to make sure your company can afford it in the first place – and setting their writing tasks – to make sure the length and, therefore, cost, are viable for your budget.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written by Chloe Bennet. Bennet is a content manager at Assignment Writers Australia and Essay Help Online. She helps with content editing and proofreading.
