Hiring Content writers for SEO Clients

What output is reasonable to expect?

[johnser]

We're starting to sell content writing to SEO clients.

The idea is that we hire someone quite good in India for $700 per month and they then have to write SEO-friendly news articles on a daily basis for a given client.

Our plan is that if the client sells "widgets", that our writer would go to Google news etc daily, search for "widgets" and write 20 original articles based on the stories / press releases that appeared.

My only problem is that we don't know if 20 pages of 300 words each is a lot to expect. Is it? What's reasonable to expect a full-time writer to produce on an ongoing basis?

TIA
J

[kevinpate]

personally test the idea for a week and see, as there is no greater evidence than empirical and no teacher wiser than Dr. Experience.

Just sit yourself down and write 20 300 word articles a day, each day, for a week.

Pick a topic you care about because after all, you're not a professional writer so why should your experiment include an unknown topic or a topic that does not interest you.

Allot yourself 20 minutes for article development, research, first draft, editing and final polishing on each article. That's just shy of 6.75 hours of work, which together with a few moments to think about things, answer an email or two, stretch your arms and shoulders, hit the bathroom, etc. will be reasonably close to an 8 hour day. If it's only 7.50 hours though, knock out that 21st article and sleep in tomorrow, what the hey, it's only an experiment after all.

Let us know how it goes, ok :)

[decaff]

"...My only problem is that we don't know if 20 pages of 300 words each is a lot to expect. Is it? What's reasonable to expect a full-time writer to produce on an ongoing basis?.."

I would say that it depends on the writer and the topic matter...if the writer is deeply knowledgeable about a particular target topic...they may be able to pump out some serious volume in short order and may be able to maintain this for sometime...but if they have to research to set some base values, and they are very efficient at this, then you could expect 2 - 3 "quality" (you are talking about creating quality content...aren't you?..not just SEO crap) articles per hour...

If the topic matter is entirely new to them .. you may only see 2 per hour..until they gain the new knowledge base necessary to collate all the base information and start building out the volume

Of course on the flip side of "volume" is how fast the search engines will index this new content and how fast they will "factor" in this new content in their "fluid calculations"..

[johnser]

That's good advice - can you believe it didn't even occur to me to actually test this stuff myself....

>>>you are talking about creating quality content...aren't you?
It's good quality stuff I'm after. Have tried the 100K auto-generated stuff but now past that :) Much healthier!

Will test 1-2 articles and see how I get on. I'm thinking 2 X 350 words should be doable.

Thanks
J