Projects You Should Outsource to a Freelance Writer

Running a successful business means wearing a lot of hats, but it also means knowing when to play to your strengths. Spending time working on projects that aren’t part of your core business activities is just time spent away from growing your business and building your company’s reach. A key area in which this is true is when you need written copy. You turn to a lawyer when you need legal help and an accountant for your books, so why don’t you turn to a writer when you need writing? If you’re not working with freelancers, chances are that you’re losing valuable time trying to accomplish writing projects in-house. This lose-lose scenario sets you up for an inefficient use of you and your staff’s time in creating content that likely isn’t as impactful as it could be. There are more projects that you can get off your plate and transfer to a freelance writer than you might imagine. Here are some ideas.

Blog Posts

Blog posts have the potential to be a goldmine for businesses, but many don’t leverage their power effectively. Take a look at your company’s site. Is your blog suffering from a stale update schedule? Are your posts long and dense, or short and awkward? Or is starting your blog still lingering at the end of your to-do list?

A freelance writer can take care of all of these problems for you and turn your blog into an important tool for promotion and generating revenue. Some of the things a freelancer can do to breathe new life (or first life) into your blog include:

• Focusing on SEO—search engine optimization—so that your posts attract traffic and position you as an important voice in your market. This will help you sell your products and services without delivering a sales pitch.
• Breaking down information into an accessible format that is readable to customers. Your closeness to your business can make it difficult to dial your writing back to basics.
• Publishing regular content. Staying consistent and updating your blog often helps to attract traffic.

Website Copy

The copy on your website should follow the same SEO rules as your blog content, so that your potential clients and customers can find you. It should also be informative and keep with the voice you want for your business. A freelance writer can build this copy for you to your specifications in a way that is engaging and that will accomplish your goals.

As with blog posts about your industry, it can be extremely hard as a business owner to develop enough distance from the work that you do to explain it to someone encountering you for the first time. A freelancer can distill the important information effectively for you, so that you don’t turn off readers with extraneous details and dense content.

White Papers and eBooks

If you are trying to establish credibility in your field, a white paper can be a great tool to have. Although knowledge is the valuable currency of a white paper, you don’t have to take on the task of writing one yourself. A freelance writer who specializes in your writing for your industry or who is an experienced researcher can develop an in-depth and authoritative paper on your behalf that can instantly enhance your company’s reputation for innovation.

Why should you have an outside writer create such an important document for you? There are two good reasons. The first reason is that there is a clear difference in readability between papers that are created by people who know the subject and papers that are created by writers—a paper that doesn’t read well won’t serve your purposes. The second reason is time. Your time is better spent on leveraging the contacts that the white paper brings to your business, not creating the document itself.

The same line of reasoning applies to eBooks as well. The only difference is that readability is even more important for eBooks, so having copy that is both informative and well-written is non-negotiable.

How-To Guides

Do you have products or services that require instruction? Your customers will become frustrated and ultimately look elsewhere if your products are too difficult to use and help is not available. For these reasons, how-to guides can be an essential part of your business—and they are best written by someone outside the fold.

In addition to having a guide that is written by someone who is a skilled writer, this is another scenario in which distance matters. If you and your team are creating your own how-to guides, your familiarity with your products and processes can obscure what users really need to know. It’s easy to make assumptions about what people understand or know about how to do things when you have a deep understanding. A freelance writer can break down the process to the bare-bones basics that your customers need in a successful how-to guide.

Newsletters

A newsletter is a useful way of maintaining a presence with your customers and clients. To keep them reading, your newsletter should be informative and useful, not to mention enjoyable. With a freelance writer, you can tick off all the boxes. By hiring a freelance writer, you can ensure that your newsletter stays fresh and is filled with a mix of different types of content, from longer form articles to short blurbs of industry news. Mixing up content styles keeps things interesting in periodic publications like these.

One of the biggest challenges that businesses who send newsletters face is making sure that each volume gets the attention it deserves and that a subpar newsletter doesn’t go out during your busy season or when you are short-handed. When a freelance writer is producing your newsletter, these concerns are non-issues. Your writer has one job: creating a consistently high-quality newsletter. Giving him or her that job allows you to stay focused on your own priorities.

No matter your industry or the size of your business, working with a freelance writer can make you more efficient and help you build recognition of your brand. Find the right writer for the job you need on Writers.Work. Submit a job or browse our community of qualified writers to discover a freelance writer for your company’s needs.