5 reasons why you should pay more for a website copywriter
Have you been wondering why you should pay more for a local website copywriter when you can get a much cheaper writer from eBidding sites?
Here are 5 reasons why you should pay more for a website copywriter
Service Level
The first thing I am going to alarm you with is this- if you can’t communicate with the website copywriter you are working with, you have no hope of communicating the message you trying to create. Language barriers, cultural nuances, massive time differences and only receiving exactly what you pay for doesn’t give your project the best start in life.
What does however give you the edge is a freelancing professional who can draw on their knowledge to provide you with a solution that you need. Sometimes it won’t be the thing you expect. And sometimes you’ll have to hash through a lot of detail to get to what works.
This is fine, as long as the service level you need is matched with the funds you provide for the project.
Local Knowledge
If laughing at Americans for calling bum bags fanny packs has taught us anything, it’s that local knowledge is super important. No really, think about that for a second.
To an American, a bum is someone who lives on the streets.
To an Australian, a fanny is a vagina.
So you don’t want to imply putting a homeless person in a bag is a good idea any more than you want to imply you’ve invented a form of luggage for your intimate lady parts.
Can you imagine the outcry you’d get if you muffed (pun intended) that message in either market?
Knowing not just what terms should be used but also what is and isn’t cool in the local lingo can save you a lot of heartache later on, and also help you create a stronger connection with your intended customer.
You simply won’t get that from a bidding site.
Keeping up with Trends
Website copywriters worth their salt care when changes are made to search engines and scramble to find out exactly what the skinny is so they steer their clients in the right direction.
We study outside of hours, come together in secret online groups to ask advice from one another, and devour Matt Cutts videos.
We take notice, learn it and apply it to what we do.
The evidence speaks for itself when you see the copywriters who keep up with SEO trends ranking well in Google on a consistent basis. And you don’t see a website copywriter sweating bullets when dodgy practices get thrown out with a Google update. They simply tweak, assess and move on.
Someone who doesn’t have a site, copies and pastes other people’s blogs onto their site, or is still talking about how many times you should stuff a keyword term into anything and everything isn’t someone you want doing your copy.
Why? Because if they can’t show you their work and that they’ve kept up with the times, how are they going to do that for you?
Aftercare
Think of your website like your car.
Would you prefer to pick a random cheap mechanic out of the yellow pages and pit them against other mechanics in a bidding war without any of the involved parties seeing the car first?
Or would you prefer to go to the mechanic you go to on a regular basis who knows your vehicle and you have a rapport with through an existing relationship?
You don’t need to throw out an entire copy deck in order to move with the changes made in search engines or technology. Keeping the original writer who did your site around can save you time and money, not to mention the time of briefing and re-briefing about your business and products. And it means that for further expansion, you keep the same voice on your site.
Word of Mouth
Happy little freelance website copywriters love having a good old fashioned chin wag about the latest project they’re working on. It’s like anything in life really. If the experience is fun, rewarding, interesting and helpful, we’ll talk about it.
Most of us spend enough time on a project understanding the product in order to translate it into hot, sexy word juice. That’s why you’ll find your happy little freelancer promoting your product to their friends, writing about your business as a case study on their website, broadcasting your news via their social media, and generally sharing word of mouth about you and your products any way we can.
But what kind of word of mouth do you get if you choose someone whose a million miles from your target market where there are no customers? Or if they have no website, social media or marketing channels of their own?
How much free promotion do you think you’ll get from someone who does a job for the bare minimum of money?
This word of mouth could very well help you gain your very first customers, so use it wisely!
The bottom line:
Don’t think about your hiring of a website copywriter (or any freelancer really) as a simple exchange of work for dollars and view your project with the respect it deserves.
Those extra dollars can make all the difference when you take into account:
- The level of service saving time;
- Applied local knowledge lessening the margin of error;
- Additional knowledge and expertise keeping you up to date;
- The financial benefits of after care and;
- The free marketing through word of mouth.
Is it really paying more when those are the kinds of things a proper website copywriter can give you?
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2 Comments. Leave new
Fantastic post Bek – and you’re so right about the word of mouth aspect. In fact, I’ve actually engaged the services of a number of my previous clients and have successfully referred others.
And anyone who has travelled *anywhere* overseas will understand just how unique the Australian culture is. I remember visiting friends in America who laughed their arses off when I asked where the rubbish bin was… just as I laughed at them for putting ‘gas’ in their cars. Given how much American influence we’re exposed to, and the vast differences in our communication styles, it’s not hard to imagine how much might get lost in translation using writers from countries who don’t speak English as their first language.
As the old adage goes: you get what you pay for.
Thanks for the compliment Anna.
Totally on board with the “get what you pay for” thing. I have a mate who makes his entire living out of saving businesses that have chosen to go the whole eBidding route for web development. Usual deal, businesses pay for an ultra cheap website and then find that it isn’t so cheap once it starts breaking link wise, not capturing all the information, or is completely and utterly useless when it comes time to do an upgrade or add additional features.
And if I see another logo that looks like it was designed for $5 on a startup, I think I’ll puke a crayon.