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If you have a content machine you need to get off the ground, and not much budget to do so, it can be really tempting to opt for the cheapest, well-rated copywriter you can find. But before you do, take a moment to consider these important points to make sure that you’re making the best use of your money, resources, and time.
Head online right now and you’ll be inundated with offers of $5 blog posts.
Sounds too good to be true, right?
Can it really be that you can get 1000 words for less than the price of a decent coffee?
Well, yes, you can.
Whether those 1000 words will bolster and benefit your brand, however, is another question entirely.
If you have a content machine you need to get off the ground, and not much budget to do so, it can be really tempting to opt for the cheapest, well-rated copywriter you can find.
But before you do, take a moment to consider these important points to make sure that you’re making the best use of your money, resources, and time.
The function of great copy
Sure, you can get an article for $5, but is it going to perform the function that you need?
With all great copy, the text leads the reader toward a call to action.
Good copywriting convinces. It charms. It teases. It excites.
You want people to visit your page, convert into customers, and share your content, right?
Ultimately, you want your visitor to return.
Great copywriting inspires trust.
First up, what exactly is SEO copywriting?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the fine art of optimising your content so that searchers to happen upon your page.
In the olden days (pre-2018), SEO looked like this:
"Want SEO copywriting? What is SEO copywriting? SEO copywriting how to. What is copywriting? You want SEO copywriting. We can give you SEO copywriting. How to."
Ouch.
It hurts the eyes, doesn't it?
We call it keyword stuffing. And it's just plain bad.
It's not helpful for the reader. And it certainly doesn't present a brand in a positive light.
Thankfully that practice is now penalised. Nowadays, Google introduced something called Rank Brain, which determines not just what your saying, but also the value of it.
What’s the value of your web copy?
Rank Brain penalises keyword stuffing. It works by cleverly spotting if you are simply packing your page with meaningless - and more to the point, useless, content. Ultimately, this stops offenders from getting to the top of the search engine results page, (AKA, SERP).
Why are we telling you this?
Because if you take just one thing away from this whole article, it’s to remember that unless your page has genuine value, it’ll never rank. No matter how many blog posts you produce. And no matter how many keywords you try to cover.
Rank Brain’s ‘value-o-meter’ (it’s definitely not called that, but it sounds fun so we’ll roll with it) was put in place because, to put it plainly, the internet is in bad shape.
Forget the Information Age, this is the age of Information Overload.
And people are drowning in it.
WordPress – which hosts 75 million websites – claims 79.7 million new blog uploads every month. 79.7 million.
That’s why the value of what you write is so important. If your content is ever going to compete against the almost 80 million other posts+ per month, it better be good.
And value is what you're more likely to get from a seasoned copywriter.
Rank Brain follows the visitor from the SERP, monitoring the duration of their stay, and observing how they engage with your content.
So, to cut it (extremely) short - modern SEO is about value to the reader. And one of the ways that value is determined, is by how long you content manages to keep readers on the page.
Copywriting isn't just about words on a page filling up an otherwise empty box on your website or blog.
It’s about imparting genuine value to potential customers.
Copywriting is a craft - just like playwriting. The words on the page should be “doing something” - they should be active.
They should be drawing the reader, actively, toward a conclusion and - more aptly - an action.
A Call To Action.
How much should you pay for copywriting services?
Well, this is the million dollar question, isn't it?
Definitely not a million dollars.
But maybe not $5 either.
And it’s not to say that there aren’t going to be great writers in that bracket. But if you pay $5, you should expect $5 worth of work - and probably not give them a hard time if they don't deliver what you would expect from a $75-an-hour copywriter.
If you want what you want first time - then you should expect to pay for it.
If you want copy that's going to keep your visitor on your page to help improve your SEO ranking and get you backlinks, then you may as well save on your next 30 $5 posts, and write one great $150 one.
Do the math
500 quality, content-focused, well-researched words take at least an hour to write.
But if you're paying someone $5, they're probably going to just scrape those 500 words from the web somewhere, so that they can move onto the next $5 article.
Because they have to work double time just to make minimum wage.
When you pay a little more, you can expect that more time, attention and thought has gone into your content's construction.
You can expect original content - not just a bunch of facts, scraped from other articles.
Sure, there are lots of services that offer unlimited copywriting for less than $300 a month - and that’s fine.
Except it’s not really fine - because it’s devaluing the craft of great, convincing copy. And worse than that, it’s exploiting the writers who’s talent every business relies on.
And if you’re still not convinced…
Here are some final facts on the value of great copywriting. This is what you should expect a skilled web copywriter actually achieve for you:
- Done right, great content marketing will achieve three-times the leads in comparison to paid advertising.
- Companies that operate a regularly updated blog - on average - receive 55% more traffic than companies who don’t.
- If you want conversions, support your copywriters with a solid content marketing strategy to work from - companies who do achieve six-times the conversions than those who don’t.
If you need a hand sourcing professional, affordable copywriters to scale your business or brand, get in touch with the Scribly.io team. Give us one task, or twenty, and with our simple, flat monthly fee our team of professional copywriters will set you up for success.
We're not just a service you outsource to, but a partner that you can trust. So whether you want to get your content machine off the ground, write amazing ads or launch a new service, we'll support you every step of the way to make sure you nail it.
Think of us as the ultimate copywriting tool to supercharge your growth.
