Having others write your content is tempting when you don’t have time to care for your blog or social networks. Content is the lifeblood of inbound marketing. Unfortunately, time and discipline are often lacking. So, we’re sometimes tempted to reach into our pockets and hire a copywriter to do the job. I’ve tried it, and it’s a terrible idea. I will explain why in this article, and I will also tell you about the offer we have developed to solve some of the problems we have seen.
I have written more than 4000 articles for this blog at 3 per week. And there comes a time when you’d like to move up a gear to boost your site’s audience. There are not 50 solutions to achieve this: you have to publish more. Ideally, it would be best if you published every day. This becomes a full-time job, and the temptation to outsource this workload becomes great. Platforms like Fiveer or Upwork are full of freelance writers ready to write an article for 50€. I did the test and had 3 articles written (in English) on data-related topics. I chose 3 freelancers who presented themselves as IT experts.
To bear in mind
- To create an audience and attract traffic to your site, you must regularly publish, at least once a week.
- There is only one goal to the production of content: to attract an audience and, in turn, backlinks and customers.
- Favoring price over quality will allow you, at best, to put online a synthesis of already existing information.
- The recipe to get backlinks is simple: develop an original point of view or publish unpublished figures.
- We have developed an offer that allows, for a contained budget, to study your B2B market and to produce figures and statistics 100% unpublished.
No original or controversial point of view
Here is the first thing that jumped out at me when I received the articles I had ordered from Upwork. The articles were assemblages of information found elsewhere. They lacked originality and did not reflect the personality of the author.
I’m not saying it’s useless. I think that a good positioning on keywords is only a by-product of the originality of your content. The information is always more numerous; it is always more challenging to synthesize. But if you want to attract prospects, especially in a B2B context, you need “shock” content. You need to make a mark with an original or even controversial point of view. Thanks to your creativity, the backlinks will follow if you manage to attract attention.
Good positioning on keywords is only a by-product of the originality of your content.
No new figures
The reality of the web is that content creators are always looking for new information, including industry figures and statistics. Producing statistics and figures to support your content should be a top priority. However, the effort required for this approach is clearly beyond what can be done with 100€ or 200€.
Conducting market research, and drawing new statistics from it, requires a significant effort and skills that also go beyond simply writing.
The 3 article proposals I received quoted figures produced or compiled by others. Some statistics are so often repeated that one wonders where they come from.
Contact us to get unique statistics on your market
This observation led us to develop an offer that allows a contained budget to conduct a survey on your market and extract completely new numerical insights. These figures then provide the material to create content and potentially interest the media.
Links to your competitors’ sites
If there’s one thing I pay attention to when writing an article, it’s never to quote a competitor, let alone link to their site.
Since the copyrighters on freelancing platforms don’t know you, they won’t bother with these precautions. The collection of information they will prepare for you, they will happily take from your competitors’ resources. And it is not excluded that you give, against your will, credit to those you want to fight.
Pay attention to internal linking!
Internal linking is essential for SEO. The most relevant internal links will always be the person’s prerogative who wrote the most content. So how can you expect an outsider to know which internal articles to point to?
No one knows your business and your goals better than you do
Content creation should have a specific business objective. You shouldn’t produce content for people who will never be customers. Every minute you spend writing content should build awareness among your marketing targets. An external content creator will have a much harder time incorporating this into content writing than you will.
No content written with an inbound marketing objective is genuinely neutral. Therefore, outsourcing the production of content implies that you define your goals precisely beforehand. However, these objectives are not only expressed in terms of keywords.
One goal you could pursue would be to get your content picked up by the media. If you think this is impossible, you are wrong. Over the years, a lot of content I have produced for my blog has been picked up by the media, sometimes on the front page. For example, my research on the effects of the RGPD was featured on the front page of a national newspaper.
Because content creation allows you to develop your knowledge
Creators are a rare hope. 99.9% of the people around you consume content but do not create it. Yet, writing content is a real privilege, in my opinion. The benefits of content creation (text, podcast, videos) go far beyond SEO.
Creating content is also about creating value for yourself. By creating content, you will learn new things, structure them, and develop your point of view. This process is enriching. So why give others the privilege of developing their knowledge rather than yours?
It is quite possible to combine your normal workload to a certain extent. It’s a matter of discipline. Writing an article a week is within anyone’s reach. You have to want it.
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