Hi guys,
Couldn't find info about this through search:
How would you recommend finding a good content writer?
And a harder one - what defines a good content (for AM purposes)?
Thank you
Depends what you want written.
If you're looking for engaging posts to build a content site, I'd usually recommend looking for people who are blogging on the subject already but not reaching a huge audience. You can see their quality immediately on the relevant subject and they'll often be pretty cheap.
If the niche is too specific for that approach, textbroker etc work too, although you won't get the engaged enthusiasm.
If you want someone to write sales material, on the other hand, like landers, you need a sales copywriter. A good converting copywriter isn't cheap: there are a lot of very specific, rare, in demand skills involved. Often if you're on a lower budget it's better to learn copywriting yourself!
I would look for a content writer that knows SEO and knows how to write for the internet (not print material). I would quiz them on SEO or have them pass a free certificate somewhere. I would also read their articles and use a tool like SEMrush to see how they are ranking and what kind of traffic they are getting. But caurmen is right, the more experienced they are the more expensive they are.
I know one of my affiliates finds writers on LinkedIn or www.contentmart.com. I have found them using Upwork as well. If you don't want to learn yourself you can take time to train a newbie.
Check out some examples of the copywriter and try to think form the user aspect. Would the average person from your target like it or not. The good copywriter needs to be able to adapt to the style and pass the useful content.
You can go through some freelancers sites like Peopleperhour.
When it comes to SEO you can check out this article
Our primary traffic source is Search and we define success as:
1) Targeting keywords we can rank for.
2) Ranking well in Google for those keywords.
After you have traffic you can start to split test different content copy and other on page elements to get people to your offer but if you haven't ranker yet that is the primary goal
Also, we have found that the most scalable methods for content creation are:
1) Hire an agency that understands keyword research and has a strong understanding of on page seo. Your budget will determine which agency to go with.
2) Hire freelancers from Upwork.com, WriterAccess.com, or ClearVoice. However, if you do this you may need to do keyword research in-house or hire someone else to do it for you. You can systematize these by creating templates for content briefs.
Depends on what you need. With SEO, content keyword stuffing went out a while ago, but a lot of the html tags actually mean quite a bit to the algorithm and ranking, especially for less competitive terms. There are a few levels,
1) the content: meaning the words, which a lot of folks may look at as keyword percentage and yada-yada
2) the markup: this is much more important, all the meta, URLs, H tags, strong tags itallics, quotes, etc. Having important stuff seem important to a bot, this is really where the money is and where a good content writer will know how to design content
3) the context: what you are doing around and linking to the content, not only on-page, but on-site and off-site all come in to play.
We train our writers extensively and have a few levels of creatives. Some folks "just write" and other "mark-up and edit" that content. It keeps creative costs low and helps us keep our editors for SEO paid better.