Working with a professional writing team may not be something you do every day—and in fact, it may be something you’ve never done before at all. Whether you’ve got a new website to write or brochures to develop—a Facebook page to maintain or a company blog to create—a time is likely to come when you need a first-rate wordsmith. When that time does come, you need to know what to expect—particularly in terms of compensation.
Degrees of Quality
So what should you expect to pay your professional writing team? Frankly, it all depends on how good you want the writing to be. There are companies out there that will charge less than a penny per word; meanwhile, here at Grammar Chic, Inc., we strive to offer competitive and affordable rates, but we also value the hard work and skill that our writers bring to the table, and just don’t think it makes sense to have them work for fractions of pennies.
In other words, the old expression you get what you pay for is very much pertinent here. When you’re hiring a team of writers, the amount of money you pay will be—to some extent—reflective of the quality of the work you’re going to get. We’re not saying you should expect writers to break the bank, but if you pay basically nothing, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get basically nothing in return.
The Problem with Cheap Writers
There are a couple of problems you’re going to run into when you pay the lowest possible bid for a professional writing team. One of the most common occurrences among low-grade writing companies is that they outsource projects to writers in other countries—writers who may be able to string together a few words but don’t necessarily grasp the cadence of the English language. This is just going to drive up your own costs, as you’ll likely have to pay a second writing team to clean up the work done by the first!
And really, this is the problem in a nutshell: Low-paid writers aren’t going to provide quality work, plain and simple. For most of your business writing projects, you’re going to need more than a few tweaks to an existing document; you’re going to need brand new copy, written from scratch—and by the way, it also needs to be written to engage readers, to appeal to search engines, and to comply with all of your marketing goals. Only true professionals can accomplish this, and true professionals are seldom available for mere pennies.
Again: You get what you pay for, and quality writing is very much worth the slight added expense.