Where's the best place to outsource article writing?

[Kay]

I'm pretty much a newbie at this. I've outsourced article writing before but only to people I know. Now it's time to jump in at the deep end because I need a lot more articles than I can possibly manage to write by myself.

I've looked at various places, scriptlance, elance, odesk. mechanicalturk, etc. I don't want to join them all. I'd rather just choose one to start with. The articles are to be written to a specific formula. I'll give the subject (keywords), word count and an example of how it should be done. Which of the usual places should I go to first? I don't want to pay too much but equally I don't want to pay peanuts and hire a monkey.

Thanks in advance.

[grynge]

I have an account with all but mechturk and I like scriptlance but more for the way it works. I actually just gave JJ a link to a decent copywriter who outsources from scriptlance in another thread lol.

I went through probably 20 - 30 copywriters before I found a couple of decent ones. The problem is if it is a business they may have 100 people writing for them and you may get 1 excellent article followed by 5 bad ones. It just takes time to sort the trash from the gems.

[Kay]

Thanks for the advice, grynge. I did see your suggestion to JJ. That's what prompted this thread. I thought it was better to start a new thread rather than hijack his one.

Good point about different people working for the same company. Oh well, I'll just have to jump in and see how it goes. I'll start with scriptlance. Shall I report back about how I get on?

[grynge]

yeah content writing is always interesting to most webmasters so I suspect a lot of people might like to know how you get on.

I only mentioned scriptlance as I found it the quickest and easiest to get results I am sure most of the better content writers are probably members of all the mainstream freelance sites.

[mpcovcd]

I recently started building my first content type site too, so I've been asking around to colleagues of mine in the biz what they recommend. A few of them suggested textbroker.com - you just write the article title, select the quality level you want, and the amount of words. They do the rest of the work - I HATE going through the process of interviewing writers, requesting samples, etc so I figure this will be the best process for me even if I end up paying a few bucks more.

I ordered a couple articles a few days ago, so I'll let you know how they turn out.

[DomainMagnate]

I used to use scriptlance.com a lot! At some point I was among the top webmasters there, but now haven't used it in a few years. It's pretty hard to find high quality writers, but overall you get what you pay for.

[JJMcClure]

Thanks for the advice, grynge. I did see your suggestion to JJ. That's what prompted this thread. I thought it was better to start a new thread rather than hijack his one.

I wouldn't have minded, it's practically the same subject and suggestions on here would most likely be useful to me too. Plus I'm pretty flexible about where threads go anyway and if I want it to stay on subject I'll usually say so And it's you anyway, there's hijacking and there's hijacking, know what I mean?

[Kay]

Glad to know I'm perceived as being "differently abled". I kinda like that.

[mpcovcd]

Alright so I got my first article back today, Author 1 took to long so they automatically reassigned it to another author. I ordered "quality level 3" which is their "average" writer and I'm thoroughly impressed, the article went over all of the specifics I asked for and reads better than 90% of the junk I see on content sites. Unfortunately it doesnt match the tone that I wanted, but I cant blame the author for that as I never specified that in the instructions. I paid $9.48 for 574 words.

[Kay]

Excellent feedback, thanks. The price seems reasonable too. Meanwhile I'm still trying to get a feel for the place before I post anything. I have some kind of hang-up about doing business with strangers. Gotta try to overcome that!