by: Amber McNaught

"Article writers wanted: I will pay $3.50 per article. Must be
quality writing – no hobbyists!"
No, this isn't a joke. It's an actual job advert, posted on a
website earlier this year. What’s more, there's nothing particularly
unusual about this advert. It seems that more and more often these
days, people expect writers to work for free – or as close to free
as it's possible to get.

So what's the catch? Well, professional copywriters won't write for
$3.50, which means that the only people who'll respond to an advert
like this will be very people the employer says he doesn't want –
hobbyists.
But what's wrong with that? Why not go with a hobbyist – a
non-professional writer? What can a professional copywriter give you
that an amateur can't?
Here's what:

1. Time
Let's think for a minute about how many $3.50 articles a writer
would need to produce in order to make anything like a decent amount
of money from it. Quite a few. Quite a few hundred, in fact. In
order for it to be worth their while, then, the cheap article writer
has to be churning them out at the rate of at least a few an hour.
They're not going to spend a lot of time on each article: what would
be the point? Even if each article takes them an hour, they're still
earning less than minimum wage, so the article you receive isn't
going to be carefully researched and written: it’s going to be
churned out in as little time as possible.

2. Quality
You may think quality doesn't matter too much. If you're
commissioning articles for a website, you may be tempted to think
that quantity is all that matters: the more pages of content and
keywords you have, the better your chances of being ranked in the
search engines, after all.
Think about why you want a good ranking though? Presumably you want
your site to be well-ranked in order to receive more traffic and
more sales. Your content, then, is there to lure in people, not
search engines. And it's a fact that most people arriving at a
website full of badly-written content will just hit that back button
right away.

3. Credibility
There's no doubt that good quality writing lends credibility to your
website or articles, while sloppy writing creates the impression
that even you didn't think your project was worth investing in, so
no-one else should either.

4. Skill and Experience
Some people think that anyone who knows how to string a sentence
together can call themselves a writer. Not so. A professional
copywriter doesn't just put words on the page: they know the right
words to use to gain the reaction you're looking for from your
audience. It takes years of experience to know what works and what
doesn't in terms of website copy. Do you really think someone who's
spent years acquiring those skills will give them away for $3.50?
Of course, it's up to you. If your main concern is adding content to
your site for very little cost, go with the $3 article writers. But
if you want to create a high quality website, with content which
will pull in visitors and keep them coming back, it could be worth
bringing in the professionals.


About The Author

Amber McNaught offers a professional but affordable
copywriting service through her business, Hot Igloo
Productions Ltd. Amber also runs WritingWorld.org - an online
agency for freelance writers, editors and proofreaders.