How to Hire The Highest Quality, Most Affordable Freelance Writers On The Internet

Finding freelance writers that can provide the quality you need at the price point you can afford is tough.

That’s especially true if your goal is to build a content distribution engine to saturate your vertical and to appear everywhere that your target audience is searching across the buying funnel. contentdistribution.com helps SaaS and e-commerce companies do just that.

Learn the #1 lever to get the fastest SEO results

Over the last six months, we’ve reviewed 1,000+ writer profiles across dozens of job sites, assigned more than 200 sample work tests, and hired 30 writers. 

Key Takeaways

We’ve learned a lot through this journey, and we’re sharing it all with you:

  1. The economics of hiring in-house writers vs. freelance writers
  2. Why high-quality writers only cost $.05c per word (note: this does not apply to ROI-driven direct-response marketers like Danial Doan)
  3. The biggest bottlenecks in turning your content investment into organic search revenue
  4. Why your content calendar is more significant than you think it is
  5. Where to consistently find the highest quality, most affordable content writers on the internet
  6. The problem with hiring from Facebook groups and how to navigate around it
  7. How to minimize the risk of missing writing deadlines
  8. The four things you need to do to keep your writers happy

The economics of in-house writers doesn’t add up

We work with companies that have raised millions in funding or are incredibly profitable, with $100,000+ per month marketing budgets that don’t hire in-house writers.

Want to know why?

Check out the going rates to hire a writer in Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle, according to GlassDoor.

San Francisco Writer Salaries

Austin Writer Salaries

Seattle Writer Salaries

The cost of hiring in-house writers

“The average writer can write 1,000 to 2,000 words per day before their brains begin to fry and quality drops through the floor” –  Gordana S., content manager at contentdistribution.com.”

That means your in-house content writer is producing somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 words of content per month. That might sound like a lot. Still, picture an ambitious, B2B brand with the goals of dominating their vertical and appearing everywhere their target audience is searching. It is not uncommon for such a B2B brand to have more than 100 unique content opportunities they need to publish to rank for all of the keywords that could attract qualified traffic.

And it’s not crazy for B2C brands to have thousands of unique content opportunities to get in front of prospects.

That’s a lot of content.

And at 20,000 words per month, and an average of 2,500 words per page, your in-house writer is only producing 6.7 pages of content per month.

Here, we did the math for you.

City Per Page Rate Per Word Rate
San Francisco $820 $0.32
Seattle $790 $0.31
Austin $620 $0.24

At 2,000 words per day / 40,000 words per month:

City Per Page Rate Per Word Rate
San Francisco $410 $0.16
Seattle $395 $0.16
Austin $313 $0.12

Hidden costs of hiring writers in-house

The rates above are significantly lower than in reality for two reasons:

  1. The salaries from GlassDoor didn’t factor in taxes and benefits
  2. The math assumes your writer is producing content five days a week with no time off

Understand how content costs dramatically impacts ROI using our SEO ROI formula (Google Sheet)

When it comes to organic search, all delays are costly

But the cost isn’t the only hidden impact of hiring an in-house writer.

The other impact is on how long it takes for you to begin to rank, generate traffic, and create an impactful acquisition channel.

You see, the two most significant bottlenecks in achieving ROI on an organic search campaign are:

  1. You can’t rank for a keyword without a page focused on that keyword. The first bottleneck is how long it takes you to work through and publish your content calendar to execute on all of the opportunities you identified to drive qualified traffic through the buying funnel
  2. The second bottleneck is how long it takes to start ranking and generating traffic after publishing

If you need to publish 100 pieces of content to rank for all of the keywords that you identified as able to drive qualified traffic, it will take you 15 months to work through your content calendar. 

That means that content published in months 7 to 12 is still maturing and providing minimal business impact a year into your organic content distribution campaign.

A 15-month content calendar plus a 6-month maturation time means it will take your content nearly two years to fully mature. 

A two-year timeline to turn organic search into a viable acquisition channel might be OK for some brands, but ambitious brands that want to crush search and generate massive audiences don’t have time to wait two years to do it.

Keep an eye on your rankings with the best SERP tracking tool. We’ve reviewed +35 of them.

Smart, ambitious brands front-load their content calendar.

Instead of publishing 6.7 pieces of content per month for 15 months, they publish their 15-month content calendar in six months.

That’s 17 pieces of content being published every month.

With a 6-month maturation time, that means by month eight, 34 pages are ranking and generating business impact. By month 12, all 100 pieces of content have matured enough to begin to rank, generate traffic, and create business value.

Here is another example of what happens when you front-load content creation.

Seriously, learn the #1 lever to get the fastest seo results

How to find good, affordable writers

Here’s the deal.

Just like the #1 lever for faster SEO results is publishing more content.

The #1 lever for hiring better writers is evaluating and testing more writing candidates.

That’s it.

The more writers you evaluate and test, the more likely you are to find the right mix of quality, affordability and capacity.

Check out the metrics on this hiring cycle:

  • 174 candidates
  • 80 invited to take our pre-hire writing test
  • 55 submitted a completed test
  • 26 writers passed the test

We use Workello to filter through hundreds of candidates to identify and hire the top 1% in just a few minutes.

Here’s how it works.

  1. Post your job ad on Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, ProBlogger, etc
  2. Watch candidates stream into your hiring dashboard
  3. Send pre-hire writing tests to your best candidates
  4. Sitback, relax and wait for candidates to take your test
  5. Hire the top 1%

Everything in Workello is pre-written and pre-optimized so you can start accepting writers into your hiring funnel in 90 seconds.

Here are some hiring guides to get you up and running ASAP:

  1. Get 200+ writers in the next 72 hours
  2. Hiring writers for hard content (Dev Ops, SaaS, legal, martech, etc)
  3. Outsource job posts to a VA
  4. Why writer marketplaces are broken

To summarize the cost of hiring in-house vs. freelance writers

We did the math for you again, and it’s not pretty. The table below is based on 100 pieces of content at 2,500 words each.

Type Per Word Total Cost
San Francisco $0.32 $80,000.00
Seattle $0.31 $77,500.00
Austin $0.24 $60,000.00
Freelancer in LCOL Country $0.05 $12,500.00

When you work with freelance writers, you can hire enough to get through your content calendar in 6 months rather than 21 months.

Think 2,500 words is too long for a blog post? Think again.

Writing more words is one of the core philosophies in ranking without backlinks. 

Hire better, more affordable writers on auto-pilot with Workello.

Your Content Calendar Is Bigger Than You Think

Copy our hiring automation for testing and hiring writers

Ambitious brands don’t just want to rank for a few keywords related to their product.

Ambitious brands want to touch their target audience multiple times across the buying funnel.

Once that qualified visitor lands on their page, they’ll fire a pixel and follow him or her across the internet.

If you are servicing a national or international audience (as opposed to local), chances are high your content calendar is a lot bigger than you think.

Like exponentially bigger.

Here are a couple of examples.

BrandChamp.io

BrandChamp helps e-commerce brands scale their influencer, ambassador, and affiliate campaigns to thousands of participants without the manual overhead of managing a vast program.

Their target audience is marketers working within e-commerce companies.

What does that buyer persona search for?

Influencer and ambassador related content.

If I were BrandChamp, I’d want to be everywhere my target audience was searching.

(To be fair to BrandChamp, they’re outranking bigger brands, with larger budgets and more backlinks for the opportunities we did target, learn how in BrandChamp’s SEO for B2B SaaS case study.

But if they want to own their vertical and become a name brand with their target audience, they need to publish a lot more content.

Let’s check out the keyword groupings:


How much more revenue would BrandChamp make if they generated the same amount of organic search of traffic as InfluencerMarketingHub.com?

With an estimated 717,000 organic search visitors per month from the exact audience BrandChamp sells to, BrandChamp would likely earn millions more.

But to get there, Influencer Marketing Hub published over 850 pages of high quality content.

Automate your B2B SaaS keyword research with ClusterAi

Tenzo Tea

Tenzo Tea sells Matcha tea with <3 from California.

Their audience is searching Google for Matcha.

There are 88,000 ways people search Google using the word ‘Matcha.’

How many unique pages of content does Tenzo Tea need to create to rank for all of the paths their target audience is taking across the buying funnel?

Over 100.

Want to know how we figured that out?

We’ve been using ClusterAi, a keyword grouping tool that does it for us.

It helps us reduce our keyword research time from 30 minutes per page to 30 minutes per project.

By telling us precisely how many pages we need to create to rank for all of the ways a target audience will search.

And by telling us exactly which variations to use on each page.

Here is how it works:

  • Export a list of thousands of keywords from Ahrefs
  • Import the list into the ClusterAi
  • ClusterAi scrapes the first ten search results of each keyword
  • And compares the pages ranking across keywords
  • Keywords that have enough URLs in common are grouped into unique content topics
  • Keywords that don’t have enough URLs in common are grouped into separate topics

Why does this work so well?

Because if two different keywords have enough URLs in common, it means that a single page can rank for both keywords.

But if two keywords don’t have enough URLs in common, it means each search result is unique, and you can’t rank for both keywords with one page, you need two pages.

Here is what Tenzo Tea’s surface area looks like to get in-front of matcha drinkers. 

 Yes, the Matcha tea keyword grouping has a combined search volume of 339,000 between the main keyword and its variations.

But that’s a super competitive keyword.

And Tenzo Tea might do everything right, and still not rank.

But some of those other keyword groupings are much more attainable.

And the people searching them are just as ready, if not more ready to buy than ‘Matcha.’

Tenzo Tea should absolutely try and rank for Matcha, but while they’re slogging it out, they should also target all of those other opportunities across the funnel.

Not sure the ROI is there to justify the content cost?

Learn how to calculate your campaign expenses and forecast your SEO ROI.

Minimizing risk to deadlines

Relying too heavily on too few writers is a recipe for missing deadlines. We’ve learned this lesson the hard way.

These writers are freelancers and will drop you for clients who:

  1. Pay more
  2. Request fewer revisions
  3. Pay on-time
  4. Are nicer to work with

Points #2 to #4 are absolutely within your control, but #1 may not be, and when we lose writers, it’s always due to #1.

It’s unfortunate to lose a great writer, but if you design your content distribution infrastructure correctly, it won’t impact your deadlines.

The key to minimizing risk to deadlines is hiring enough writers so that each writer is only writing one article per week.

There is nothing worse than assigning a bunch of content to a writer, communicating timelines to other stakeholders, then being blindsided by a resignation email, or getting ghosted when you touch base.

When you assign one article per week to a writer, and they quit or ghost you, you can re-assign that piece of content to another writer, and because you’re working with a handful of writers, the impact on your timeline of one piece of content is minimal.

The four things you need to retain your writers

Retaining your writers is simple:

Pay them on-time. We pay our freelancers twice a month.

Don’t make your emergency their emergency by springing last-minute deadlines on them. You’re not their only client, and they are juggling other deadlines. Give a seven day turnaround time at a minimum.

Provide enough up-front guidance on precisely what you want so that you can keep the number of revisions to one. The more rounds of revisions you request, the less the writer makes per hour. It also has the benefit of reducing your turnaround time from 1st draft to publishing.

Writers are sensitive, your feedback needs to not only be constructive, but it also needs to be tactful.

Our best content

Want to learn how we’ve grown 4 websites from approximately zero to 100,000 visitors per month, with the biggest one doing 500,000 in just 17 months?

We share it all.

    1. How to rank without backlinks
    2. How Google actually works (based on 65,000 page 1 keywords)
    3. How to turn any writer into an SEO content writer
    4. The #1 lever to get the fastest SEO results
    5. How we crush B2C SaaS SEO
    6. SEO ROI Calculator
    7. How to find and hire the highest quality, most affordable writers on the internet
    8. Brand Jacking (ranking for your competitor’s brands)
    9. How we crush B2B SaaS SEO
    10. The greatest SEO case study of 2020: 0 to 479,000 monthly organic in 16 months