Dynamic Copywriting

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, lawyer marketing, lawyer advertising, web content writer, white papers

I read Jonothan Leger’s blog, www.jonathanleger.com, every day and always find new and useful information on his pages. His advice ranges from how to get more traffic to your website, how to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to make more money with adsense ads.

Recently, he wrote an article called, Should You Hire People To Write Your Articles For You? on his experience hiring a ghostwriter to write online articles to get more traffic to one of his websites. He placed a project on eLance and got three bids for the five article project.

The lowest bid, was for a mere $10 per article and that is the one he chose. Not that Jonathan was being cheap, but the other two bidders neglected to provide any feedback or ratings to justify their higher prices. (This should be a lesson for any freelancer, provide credibility information when you solicit new work)

The ghostwriter got the work done quickly and emailed the five finished articles back to Jonathan within 48 hours.

Problems With Cheap Ghostwriting Work

But, it didn’t come without a few bumps in the road. As Jonathan puts it:

”But the articles were clearly written by somebody who did not speak and write English as a first language, and so there were little grammatical issues that I would have to go in and fix. Having to go in and fix these grammatical errors takes time, and the whole purpose of hiring a ghost writer is to save time, so this extra step took away some of the value of hiring out for the job. However, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and I hired the cheapest group to write the articles.”

Hiring a ghostwriter is a viable way to publish online articles that will drive traffic to your site if you do not have the time or skill set to write them yourself. But as Jonathan Leger’s experience shows, hiring the cheapest writer may cause problems. You do not expect to have to rewrite something you have already paid for.

Moreover, as I mentioned the other day in my article, 10 Tips For Choosing A Ghostwriter For Your Online Articles, it takes a certain skill set be able to write a good article AND write HTML code AND know how to include your target keywords in order to produce online articles that drive traffic to your website.

I’m curious to know if any of you has had experience either doing ghostwriting work for others or hiring ghostwriters to get a project done on your behalf. Send me your feedback and comments.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

More and more businesses are discovering that hiring ghostwriters to write online quality articles for them is one of the fastest and best ways to drive traffic to their websites and enhance their professional reputations.

For your own business, you might want to consider this: These online articles, written by ghostwriters, are possibly the best types of links you can get to point to your website. Because the readers have read the articles and clicked on your link, they are highly targeted visitors who want more information about what you can do for them.

In other words, not only does your ghostwritten online article lead visitors to your site, it also pre-sells those visitors by giving them a reason to find out more.

Here are some tips to help you choose the right ghostwriter to help you build your online presence with quality online articles:

1. Make sure your ghostwriter knows how to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) techniques with your article. This means the writer must have an understanding of how to include your targeted keywords into the text so that your articles will be picked up by search engines like Google and Yahoo. There are many ghostwriters who know how to write, but know nothing about how to get high search engine rankings. Choose a writer who can help you get more traffic in addition to writing your article.



2. Does the writer know HTML code? Can he or she embed your key words into links in the article so that they point to several different pages on your site? Is that writer’s HTML proficiency enough to make the article’s layout look appealing to a reader’s eye and to avoid making it have a “big block look” with lots of unbroken text. Remember, just publishing the article is not enough if readers don’t read it.




3. Make sure your ghostwriter has a track record and samples of articles you can see and read. Has this writer published his or her own articles online at sites like ezinearticles, searchwarp, articlecity, goarticles or any of the other big article banks? Not only will reading this writer’s own articles give you an idea of that person’s writing skills, it will also show that the writer understands the concept of article marketing.




4. Can the writer write like a native speaker of the language? Most of the time you will want these articles written in English because this language still dominates most of the article banks and newsletters. Of course a writer does not have to speak English as a primary language in order to write flowing prose. But many people have paid low prices to have an article written by an inexpensive ghostwriter only to receive an article that is written in a choppy, awkward syntax. Again, you can avoid this by seeing the writer’s own articles if he or she has a website and has written articles for the online article banks mentioned above.




5. Is the payment arrangement reasonable? The common practice is to pay half the writer’s fee up front and only pay the remaining half after receiving the articles. Understand that the writer still holds the copyright to these materials until you have paid the entire fee, and it only transfers to you when the final payment has been made. But be wary of someone who wants it all up front, just as a writer will understandably be wary of you if you only want to pay after the articles are written.




6. Are the ghostwriter’s fees ridiculously cheap or outrageously expensive? You get what you pay for in all areas of life. You should expect to pay a minimum of $50 to $75 for a well-written article with SEO techniques. On the other hand, for a very technical article that requires a lot of research, you should expect to pay as much as $150 or more. Even at the high end of these ranges, you are still getting a very good price for an experienced writer who can often get $1 per word for commercial writing work (these online articles average about 500 words so at these rates you are paying between 10 cents to 30 cents per word). If you go after the bargain basement writer, you will get bargain basement results.




7. Does the writer finish the project in a timely manner so you don’t have to wait weeks and weeks for your finished articles? Another reason to check the writer’s status on article banks like ezinearticles is that you will see if this writer is prolific enough to write quality articles quickly and have them back in your hands in time to do you good. Check to see if the writer has achieved special status with the article banks like Platinum Writer or Expert Author. These designations will help you determine if this writer can produce the output fast enough, without sacrificing quality, to suit your needs.




8. Does the writer’s fee include re-writing? As long as you gave the writer clear directions about the content you wanted, reasonable rewriting should be part of the fee. As a writer however, I have had to put my foot down on a few occasions when the finished article came back meeting the original instructions given to me and the client just changed his mind and wanted a whole new type of article written. In those rare instances (it has only happened to me twice) I insisted on a new fee for a totally new article. But ordinarily, you should not have to pay more for a little rewriting within the scope of your original instructions.




9. Does the writer package the work in a reasonable number of articles? This means, writing several articles on the same topic all at once. I generally feel that a minimum of ten articles on the same topic is needed for the project to pay off for me and for the price to be reasonable for the client. This way, all my research is spread over ten or more articles and I can price my work accordingly. Besides, writing one article at a time will not make a significant impact on the amount of traffic you get to your site. Depending on how much competition you have for that keyword, you will probably need 20 or more before you start seeing significant gains in the number of visitors coming your way.




10. Does the writer have an online presence other than just an email address? You want to avoid someone who can only be contacted by email. So you should be able to see an actual website owned by the writer, have a telephone number and be able to read samples of this writer’s other articles. When someone actually has a website, you have more assurance this person is a committed business person who is not likely to take your up front money and disappear. A well thought out website indicates someone who takes a professional approach to being a freelance writer.

Online articles are powerful and fast ways to drive traffic to your website. Working with a good ghostwriter can greatly improve the process and deliver results to your bottom line faster.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

Do you want to drive more traffic to your website? Do you also want to build a reputation online as an expert in your field?

There is a very simple, low cost way to do both. Write and publish articles online. Hopefully you’ve seen sites like www.ezinearticles.com, www.articlecity.com or www.ideamarketers. These sites are places writers can submit short, 250 to 900 word articles and make them available for webmasters to use for their own websites.

This is the perfect win-win arrangement. The webmasters get free content for their sites, as long as they do not make changes to the articles and give the author a link pointing back to his or her site.

The writers, in my opinion, get a lot more. They get to include a “resource box” at the bottom of their articles that tells readers a little bit about themselves, a link back to the author’s site and the author keeps his or her copyright on the material.

A single article can become a viral marketing tool if it is picked up by dozens or hundreds of other websites. I have one article that is now posted on 167 different websites, and each of those websites now has a permanent link pointing back to my site.

The cumulative effect of writing a lot of articles is enormous levels of traffic to your site. Depending on how competitive your particular niche is, a critical mass level might be 50 articles, or it could be 100. But once you hit that level, you will never have to worry about getting enough traffic to your site.

But what if you have neither the time nor the skill to write these articles? The solution is simple. Hire a ghostwriter. For example, I have had several clients hire me to write articles in their names to post on these sites. I typically charge between $50 to $150 per article, depending on how much research I have to do. In a few cases, the cost has been higher, but those are rare occasions, and the work I had to put in to write those particular articles was quite significant.

If you choose to work with a ghostwriter, you will benefit from the economics of scale. Hire the writer to produce a minimum of ten articles. The research needed to write a dozen or so articles is often not much more than it is for one article. I have found that writing articles for a client in batches allows me to charge fees at the lower end of my fee scale.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown