How To Save 99% On Your Marketing Costs Using Freelance Writers

5 Steps To Save 99% On Your Marketing Costs Using Freelance Writers

Winning new business can be expensive. I’d like to show you how I reduced my costs of getting new customers in the door by 99%.

Generating content for marketing is key to attracting new customers and engaging current ones. While having more quality content normally equates to more business having the time, money or skills to create this content can be a big stumbling block. It was for me.

I learned how to get other people do the leg work for me; aka the freelance writer. Here’s the 5 steps I went through with examples on how I used free lancers to drastically reduce my marketing spend.

#1: Learn How To Drink The Coolade.

Let’s start by looking at the two basic ways I was spending money to get people to my website because it shaped the way I was to view freelancers.

1. SEO / organic search – create blog articles that people discover through search engines.
2. Paid search – purchase keywords on somewhere like Google (Adwords).

Both methods have pretty much the same result: they get someone to click on a link and arrive on our Flashissue blog site.

In theory, buying keywords is quicker and easier and therefore less scary than writing stuff.  Initially the thought of creating tons of content by writing blog articles was scary and time consuming to me. BUT the benefit of doing it ended up being huge and it turned into the gift that keeps giving.

An adword campaign is finite in time and benefit – I run a campaign, people come to my site and then they stop coming when I stop buying the ads.

Content marketing on the other hand is perpetual. An article is written, people discover it and they come. And they keep coming and coming because it’s always there for them to discover on Google search.

Here’s my comparison between the two approaches the cost savings are big – 99% big.

So far using freelance writers I’ve created 295 blog articles and they’ve generated 23,997 unique views in the last 6 months. A view is a person reading the article. This equates to 81 views per article which equates to 61 cents per view if you assume each article costs $50 (I actually paid a lot less than this but we’ll leave it at $50). Compare that to what it would have cost to “buy” from Google using Adwords and it becomes a no brainer.

Here’s some sample articles that were created:

How to create a newsletter in Gmail and remain sane

Apartment property manager newsletter

Why you need a content marketing schedule

The 12 month and 24 month columns are estimates going forward assuming that the articles keep driving people from search in the same numbers (which they will because the searchable content stays out there).  My effective cost per visit will keep falling over time because I only had to pay for the article to be written once.

Here’s what it would have cost me to buy a click on Google Adwords for the same type of keywords I’ve been using with freelance writers:

That means it would cost anywhere between $11 and $22 to get a visitor to my site. Compare that to $0.15. Coming from the email industry my keywords are pretty expensive, yours may be cheaper and the savings not quite as big but even so.

You can see how apart from the top few articles that generated disproportionately more views, the majority of my traffic comes from many articles generating a few visits (the “long tail”).

Buying into the concept of creating content was simple when I first learned about it. The next thing to solve was how to find a really cost effective and time efficient way to generate content: start using freelance writers.

Using outside help in the form of freelance writers is a great way to save time but it doesn’t happen all by itself and as with most things it can’t be put on 100% autopilot.

I’d like to uncover some of the mystique about using freelance writers as a way to crate your blog and email content.

Next week ( Part 2) – Steps 2-5 : How to go about finding and using Freelance writers.