This might seem as a wild joke to you: you buy articles and you pay less? Something needs to be wrong with the way of presenting the matter. The fact is only the wide-spread prejudice that buying content is more expensive than actually hiring a full-time content writer to produce it is the “wrong” thing here.
I’ve already talked to you about why should buy articles from true content writers, rather than try to produce it yourself or hire the people to do this at your company, and I’ve given you a lot of reasons, among which is buying quality content from people who are adept at producing it. Now I want to give you a really pragmatic reason, one with which we all click: money.
Buy articles. Why? The answer is Money
I don’t want to stick a bunch of numbers in your head, I just want to show you a realistic comparison between hiring a full-time writer and buying articles from a content creation service. Alexandra Nicola, one of the content writers at Squirrly, has already answered the question of Why you should buy articles for your content marketing strategy ( check it out to see various other reasons, beyond the financial one, of why this strategy is great).
Do you remember the money triangle diagram?
When it comes to money, I think we can all agree that we want the best quality we can get at the lowest price. If you look at the pyramid, this might take time. However, this is not quite so with a good content creation service, as usually you agree upon a schedule when your article/blog-post/content is to be delivered. Squirrly is such a content marketing company, at which you can decide together with the content creators upon a content plan, they can even design an editorial calendar, and for a small charge, a professional team can even administer your blog, so as to publish content at its due time.
Basically, a good content creation service from which to buy articles is the best strategy for getting quality at the lowest price. You can decide upon the Time invested, so that there won’t be any problems.
On the contrary, you might say that if you want cheap, but good, you should produce it yourself (as you see I’m totally excluding the possibility of hiring a full time writer, which you’ll understand in a second, when we’ll take a look at the numbers).
The idea of writing content on your own is a good one if you want cheap. Nevertheless, it might also mean this content is poor quality and time-consuming. Why? You might not be skilled as a content writer, you might not have the passion or talent of one, or the task might seem as a burden to you, taking from the time you already invest in your day-to-day job.
Buy articles or hire a full-time writer?
Now it’s time to take a look at the figures. I want to state this from the very beginning: buying content is cheaper than hiring a full-time writer.
The average salary of a web content writer according to Indeed is $60.000. As you can see from the graphic below, the salary is on the rise:
However, Payscale shows that in the US “An Online Marketing Content Writer earns an average salary of $39,847 per year.” Things to be taken into consideration are experience, and skills or diplomas in Marketing Communications. In this case, the salary doesn’t seem that astounding, but the fact is the money is a lot more than the money you’d spend to buy articles from freelance writers or from content creation services.
Blog posts of up to 500 words cost between $50 to $70, while those of 1000 words or more are about $100. Basically, if you schedule an editorial calendar in which you have about 1 blog post of 500 words per day 7 days out of 7 (though I don’t think you’ll necessarily want to post every single day), you’ll be investing about $26.000. Now, you might want a more consistent blog post once every Friday, of let’s say 2000 words, which can reach the price of $150. The intervals at which you post, how often and how much depend on your type of blog and audience, but the fact is in either case you won’t be putting into it as much money as in hiring a full-time content writer.
Squirrly. A content creation service
In order to show you exactly what I’m talking about I want to give you an example, by using the prices that we have here at Squirrly.
Let’s say that you have an online business and you engage with your audience and spread the news, by means of a blog. For that blog you want to publish 500-word posts on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 5 P.M. because that’s when your audience is active, and they’ve become used to this schedule, and you want to promote the posts on social media. You’d also like longer blog posts of more than 1000 words for your Special Sundays, and occasionally maybe you’d need more content. You’re not so good with administering your posts either, you constantly forget when to publish them, so how much will it cost you to have all this sorted out?
Now, your 3 500-word articles will be $600 per month, your 1000-word articles will be $400 per month ( in this price social media messages are included) and for making an editorial calendar and publishing on your blog you’ll be charged with an additional $20. Basically, for about $1000 per month you get to have a professional blog. That’s only $12.000 per year, so you can’t even compare this with hiring a full-time writer for your company.
So, if you want quality content on your blog and you don’t want to pay that much, I suggest you buy articles from really great content creation services.
