If your blog is a big part of your marketing, sales, or lead capture strategy, you’re going to need well-written content to bring in new visitors, increase conversions, and encourage people to interact with your site. Unfortunately, many of us aren’t writers and even more of us don’t have much experience with SEO, even though search engines demand a high expertise of both of those skill sets.

As a business owner you have 3 options:

• Hire someone in-house to do your content writing.
• Write it yourself.
• Hire a freelancer.

For the majority, hiring a freelancer is usually the most attractive of these options because it means you don’t have the long-term expense of hiring a new employee. Additionally, you might not have a long-term position available if you only require a limited amount of web content. Before you hire a freelancer, make sure you understand these basic principles of working with a freelancer to get the most bang for your web content bucks:

Pay Them Well

You probably get a little annoyed when someone demands you goods or services for an unreasonably low price. You know, deep down, the quality is probably going to be s**t. The same is true for most freelancers, and the truth is that good writing usually doesn’t come cheap.

You’ll quickly learn that there’s a delicate balance between price and the quality of a freelance writer’s work. Pay too little and spend your time editing and fixing an amateur writer’s work. Pay for quality work and you’ll get well-researched, creative, intelligently formatted web content that keeps readers on the page.

Additionally, it’s important to know that freelancers take a cut of your payment to the contractor. Keep that in mind when factoring your budget for web content.

Ask Them about Themselves

Many freelance writers will be treated as faceless entities behind a username or email address by the people that hire them. This is especially true if you’re using Craigslist or a site like Elance to find your writers.

You can avoid a lot of stress and potentially improve the quality of a freelance writer’s work by asking them to tell you a little about themselves. Not only will it help you improve your relationship with your contractor, but it will teach you more about their capacity.

Ask about their work history to learn about their skillset and expertise. You never know, you might discover that your web content writer would be perfect to help you develop a whole new section of your site.

Set Deadlines

This is an important recommendation and will make your experience working with a freelance content writer go much smoother. Far too often, people hiring a freelancer will simply say, “Get it to me as soon as you finish it,” or “I need it as soon as possible.”

These directions are ambiguous and they don’t take the freelancers work capacity into consideration. This can create unnecessary tension in the working relationship and degrade the quality of the work you receive.

Establishing a firm deadline with your freelance writer sets reachable expectations up front that both parties can agree on and abide by. You can stay on schedule and your writer knows exactly how much time he or she needs to complete the job while being able meet their own life obligations.

Specify Your Requirements

The more time you spend articulating your directions to a writer, the less time you’ll spend doing edits when they’re done writing your web content. If you know what you want but can’t put the right words on the page, create a skeleton outline for your writer. Chances are if you’ve decided to hire them, they have experience writing some form of web content and will know how to fill in the blanks where you can’t.

It is also important to communicate your requirements effectively. If you’re good at creating a Word document outline, send it to them in that form. If you’re better at talking through what you want, see if your contract writer will schedule a quick Skype or telephone session so you can detail what it is you want to see on your website. Very seldom will a freelance content writer complain about too much direction from a client.