Are you sruggling with blog posts?

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by Frank477

I'm new to this forum and I am enjoying it already. There is something quaint and familiar about it, I can tell the folks here have become great adviser's and friends. ;-)

That aside, I would like to chime in; I often have trouble coming up with content and recently I have been looking into possibly hiring a content writer or service. The problem that I am facing is that there are so many writers out there.

I have no idea where to begin, how to weed out the good writers, what a fair price for content is and so on and so on.

What if any experiences have you all had and would you recommend a writer or service?

Hi Frank,

Thanks for asking, and I'm glad you're enjoying the forum!

I've hired many writers in the past...

The answers to some of your questions depend on what you want the writer for. If you're hiring for simply "SEO" reasons (just to have something the search engines will index) - where grammar and the right spelling often seem not to matter too much! - then it can be very cheap. But, if you want better quality writing, then of course it costs more (as you'd expect)...

There are many freelance websites around. That's where I'd go to look for writers. In general, every writer on one of those sites will have a portfolio of their work you can look at - so you can get an idea of what that writer's skills are like. There's also generally feedback from those who have hired the writer before, which will also give you an idea of what they're like, too.

One good idea is to hire a writer for a small project - kind of like as a "trial." Then, if all goes well, you can hire them for something bigger!

For example, let's say you wanted to hire a writer to "ghost write" a book for you. You could first hire, say, three writers to write one article each. Then, choose the best one out of the three, and ask them to write your book. (That's what I would do.)

Make sure you have a "work for hire" contract that specifies that you own the copyright of the resultant work. Otherwise, the writer will own the rights. It's better for you to own the rights, so that if you want to "reuse" the writing in the future, there won't be any problems with doing that.

Here's a sample contract - http://www.docracy.com/0s38bg2lkok/w...ng-agreement-1

The key part of that contract is this part:

"9. OWNERSHIP/COPYRIGHT. All original Work created for this project shall be considered 'work-for-hire' performed in the United States of America. The copyright for all Work produced under this agreement shall belong to the Writer until 100% of payment has been received. Upon receiving full payment, the Writer shall transfer all rights to the Client. Client shall exclusively own in perpetuity all now known or hereafter existing rights of every nature worldwide pertaining to such Work in or as part of any version of the Client’s publications that are published in print or displayed through computer-assisted and other interactive media such as the Internet and World Wide Web (collectively the 'Rights'). Writer hereby irrevocably grants and assigns to the Client all Rights for the Work free from any restrictions and limitations."

(You can find other sample "work for hire" contracts for writers if you do a search. Make sure that, in the end, you'll own the copyright to the resultant work...)

One freelance website you can try is oDesk. While I haven't hired writers from there, I have hired editors there, and it all went well.

I hope that helps!

Best wishes,

Dien