Content has become an integral part of marketing in the information age. It can take many forms, and its creation includes many people.
Graphic designers come up with illustrations. Content editors check for grammatical errors and overall consistency. Content managers develop ideas and shepherd them through to reality.
Meanwhile, content writers are some of the oldest and most enduring professionals in the content creation space. Whether it’s composing text for a blog, an infographic, or a video script, most content requires a professional writer at some point along the way.
The necessity to hire a writer is common, especially if a company has a blog that it’s adding to regularly. The question is, does it make more financial sense to hire an in-house blog writer or to outsource the work to a freelance writer?
Why Outsourcing Blog Writing Makes Financial Sense
There are many benefits to in-house writers. You can work with the same person for a long period of time and train them to intimately know your company’s products and services. They can become very familiar with your brand’s tone and voice.
The thing is, you can get many of the same benefits from a competent and dependable contractor, too. If a freelancer is good at their job, they should be able to learn your processes and products quickly.
One area where an in-house writer doesn’t make sense, though, is the paycheck. Interestingly, at first glance, freelancers can look more expensive. It’s tempting to look at a freelance writer’s rates, see that they’re more per word than what you’re paying your full-time writers, and walk the other way.
But there are a lot of other costs that quietly undermine the perceived monetary value of an in-house writer. For instance, here are a few financial elements you won’t have to worry about if you outsource your blog writing:
A Full-Time Paycheck
You need to pay a salaried writer an hourly rate for 40 hours each week every week of the year. In contrast, a freelancer often works for each client for only four or five hours a week. Sometimes even less.
Benefits
There are a lot of benefits associated with hiring an employee. Some of these are required by law, such as social security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ comp. Others come as part of a savvy retention strategy, like a 401(k) option and contribution matching or tuition reimbursement.
Relocation Fees
Some companies require an in-house writer to work on-site. If that’s the case, you may pay thousands of dollars in relocation fees to help them move or a signing bonus to attract great talent.
Training Expenses
You typically need to onboard a writer, whether they’re a contractor or an employee. But ongoing training, upskilling, and reskilling are also standard. This is an expense that businesses shoulder for their employees — but not for freelancers.
Long-Term Commitment
When you take the time to find, vet, hire, and train a staff writer, you want them to stick around. However, if your blog writing needs don’t require a consistent or full-time quantity of work, this long-term element can become financially burdensome. In addition, if you use a freelance writer seasonally or only once or twice a quarter, you don’t need to provide a severance package or pay them when they’re not writing.
Administrative Time
Along with the obvious items with dollars and cents signs attached, there’s also the question of time. It takes a lot of time to oversee an in-house writer. When you outsource the activity to a seasoned third-party professional, they are often managed by an equally outsourced editor, saving you time, and translating to financial savings in the long run.
Travel expenses
Sometimes, you may require a writer to travel to attend a convention or press event. When they’re on staff, you need to cover their expenses. When they’re a contracted agent, you can often expect them to cover their own costs.
Not All Outsourcing Is the Same
While there are many factors that make financial sense when outsourcing your blog writing, not all outsourcing is the same. Here are a few key things to remember if you decide to pass off your blog writing to an outside source.
First, there are many different ways to outsource the writing process. Each of these comes with different costs.
- Ad agencies are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Nevertheless, they still exist. This option allows you to pass off a lot of the workload, but it tends to be by far the most expensive choice on this list. If you’re looking to save money, you may want to consider something else. Building a branding strategy alone can cost thousands of dollars when working with a larger agency.
- Independent freelance writers work with clients on a case-by-case basis. You must find writers you like and then build a relationship with them. If you take the time to hire an editor, find a content manager, and otherwise set up the internal infrastructure, you can save quite a bit of money by working with a stable of freelance writers.
- A writer marketplace is a great middle ground between an agency and the free-for-all of finding your own writers. Good marketplaces, like PowerPublish, attract a pool of vetted freelance writers that you can choose from.
- Hiring a freelance editor is also an option that can simplify things. A contracted editor functions as a touchpoint between you and the freelance writers generating your content. They take care of figuring out your blogging needs and then hiring the best writers to get the job done.
Along with different outsourcing options, the kind of content you need can impact the price you pay. For instance, generating basic content with an adequate writer is the cheapest. If you want to hire a writer with expert knowledge of a certain subject, their content will come with the greatest cost.
The happy medium is to work with a high-quality writer comfortable in a dedicated field, like healthcare or tech. Have SMEs (subject matter experts) on your staff interview and work with them to share critical information and curate content.
Using PowerPublish to Outsource Blog Writing
If you see the financial benefits of outsourcing your blog writing, but you’re intimidated by the thought of finding writers on your own, the staff at PowerPublish is ready to lend a hand. We’ve designed our writer marketplace to give you access to a large, qualified pool of writing talent.
Many of our writers specialize in high-profile areas, too, like the tech, legal, and healthcare industries. If you want assistance outsourcing your content creation, schedule a demo. We’d love to help you maintain a high-quality company blog without the costs that come from keeping an oversized in-house marketing staff.