One of the most common questions every legitimate, high-quality website designer, content writer or search-engine optimizer gets asked is this: What about the people who advertise they’ll do the same thing you do for the price of a Super Sonic Cheeseburger without the cheese?
The generic answer to that question — an answer that applies to designers and SEO experts as well as writers — is this: They’re lying. They couldn’t do what professionals do whether you paid them in day-old Krispy Kreme dumpster donuts or ingots of solid-gold. They simply don’t have the skill, talent, experience, knowledge or intelligence to do the job well. If they did, they wouldn’t accept assignments guaranteed to not bring in enough money to cover their ISP bill, let along their rent.
That’s the generic answer. There are also, obviously, task-specific reasons why you don’t — and can’t — get high-end web creation work for low-ball prices. In writing, most of the differences between great quality, acceptable quality and totally unusable copy are readily apparent … the bad grammar, misspellings, poor flow, and yawn-inducing prose of the unskilled scribe are out there on the screen … where everyone visiting a site can see them and quickly move on to a better, more literate site.
There is one crucial hidden element, however. One veiled characteristic that separates the real web-content writers from the wannabes; the writers who can generate sales and repeat visits on your site from those whose prose drives potential customers away; the productive wordsmiths from the syntax-challenged stiffs.
That element is research. Good writers take pride in their ability to research almost anything, from historically obscure data about the origins of cufflinks, to the latest, cutting-edge technology for aircraft collision avoidance. Not only do professional writers know how to locate and collate a ton of relevant information, they know how to winnow it down to just the crucial points needed to tell the website’s story, and then translate those points into easy-to-understand, compelling words.
The importance of proper research in writing web copy cannot be overstated. No matter what your e-business or profession, the chances are good that nobody knows as much about it as you do. Certainly not your customers, they’re relying on your site to tell them what they need to know. But you, in part because you have such a deep store of knowledge about the subject, may not be the best judge of how to share that knowledge with people who need only enough facts upon which to base a buying decision.
In sales, too much information can be as deadly a deal breaker as too little.
Which isn’t to say that you should just hire a professional writer and disappear until the job is done. It is almost always desirable, and frequently absolutely necessary, for you to take some time and talk to any writer you hire about specifics relating to the way you do business, your philosophies, your policies. No amount of research, can tell a writer what your policy on shipping costs for warranty repairs is, for just one example. That kind of information has to come from you.
Maybe everything on your site should, in a perfect world, come from you. Very few of us live in a perfect world, however. Most of us have businesses to run, that’s why we’re on the web in the first place. How about you?
Do you have 15 or 25 hours to sit at your desk and teach your business to some writer who you’re going to use to write one or two or three pages or articles for your site? And even if you do have the time, what’s that time worth? Fifty bucks an hour, seventy-five an hour, one hundred? Saving a few dollars by hiring a writer who isn’t competent to do his or her own research could be the most expensive economy move you ever make.
Sometimes clichés are actually based on truth, more frequently they’re not. When it comes to content for your website, the old hackneyed phrase “you get what you pay for” is not at all true.
Hiring a nothing writer at a next-to-nothing rate won’t get you what you paid for, it will get you even less. Hiring a pro who can write with passion and research with skill, a true craftsperson like those working at GetWebContent.com, virtually guarantees you’ll receive additional value above and beyond what you expected when you and the writer agreed on a price.
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