Freelance Writers… You get what you pay for
My cancun blog has been pretty dead since my last writer bailed out on me several months ago. I vowed to getting it going this week, and I’ve been making a plan of action to resurrect it this year to become a reliable income source for me. So with the brainstorming already finished, I got serious about finding a reliable writer. After my initial attempt, I realized that when outsourcing, doing it smart is the only way. And doing it smart means you find reliable, qualified writers, and 90% of the time you will pay a premium for these writers. Deal with it.
So why do I feel this way now? Well to find a writer I made a thread over at Digital Point forums, and received several responses. They were all pretty bad but I settled on one guy and agreed to buy two blog posts from him (for a really cheap price) to test him out for the blog. Here’s a short excerpt from one of his posts:
Cancun is perhaps the best tourist destination of the world. The spell bounding beauty of the city leaves the tourists mesmerized and over whelmed. The over all experience of a vacation in the beautiful city of Cancun is complemented by the great services that are available to the various tourists at amazingly affordable prices. The city has a large number of hotels, about 150 in number. As a result of the large number of hotels, the prices are extremely low. All this adds up in favor of the tourist. The tourists that visit Cancun are often spoiled for choice owing to the large varieties of almost all products that are available….
What? The writer seems to be absolutely clueless about what a qualified blog post is. I asked for a blog post with travel tips, ideas, deals, etc for prospective travelers, but I end up getting a wikipedia entry for Cancun. Both of his posts are completely useless to me, other than using them as examples for terrible freelance writing.
I guess I am glad that I finally learned this lesson, and I will now be shelling out a decent amount of money for a real travel writer. So if anybody knows of a decent one to recommend to me, I’m all ears.
I’d love to help a fellow College Startup blogger!
I think that before you hire someone you should ask for a few samples of his works, and after that decide if you want to pay him or not.