#agency-life
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Hey all, happy Monday!! Does anyone have any tips or places that they look for freelance writers? As an agency we seem to be coming up against the same problem time after time of not being able to find good enough writers for specific client projects....we don't want to put test writers on new clients but we also don't have a bank of verified writers to use
Check out the #freelance-gigs channel here. It's led to us hiring some pretty good writers.
I also recommend Verblio. I've been using it for about a month now and I was legit surprised at the quality of writers we've been able to find
Thank you @Taran Soodan!!
I know it's not fancy, but I got a TON of leads from posting on Twitter. We ended up hiring 2 absolutely phenomenal freelancers from that one post (which was the number of slots I had). It takes some qualifying, for sure, but it was great.
Also, we've found that asking for one test piece before confirming ongoing freelance work has made a pretty massive difference in the quality we end up with. A lot of freelancers have sent us pieces that seem great, but when we get work from them, the quality is completely different. It's hard to tell what you're going to get for sure until you see an unedited, raw piece from them.
@Rebekah Edwards thank you! This is one of the problems that we keep facing, the samples seem more than OK but the actual piece that they end up writing for us is no where near that level. How do you use the test pieces?
What's your process for qualifying the writers initially?
@Katie Bray We generally start by asking for a resume and at least 3 examples of their work, as well as their rate. I can usually disqualify most folks based on those things alone — we have a short list of things we look for in their examples, and if those are missing, we just let them know it's not a fit. It's not a perfect system, though.
We're still honing our process for the test pieces, but what we've found works best is to assign something that we don't owe a client for 4-6 weeks. That way, if they send us something remarkably bad, we have time to assign it from scratch to an existing writer if needed.
We also have a pretty robust content brief and writing checklist all our writers get. That's improved the initial work we get from them a LOT!
Great to know, thanks so much!
We've found success on
They have the ability to do casting calls, which I've found helps narrow people down.