As a freelance writer (you may style yourself a content marketer), you have a ton on your plate.
- You’re trying to get new clients to feed the ever turning machine of revenue and profitability.
- You’re trying to deliver great content to your clients so they keep paying you to create great content.
- You’re trying to help your clients understand the value of the great content they’re paying you to create.
On top of all of these expectations you also have to actually create the content or manage the freelancers you work with who are the subject matter experts your clients want to employ.
It’s a lot.
So you define the topics, interview the subject expert, write (or manage the writing of) the content, and send it over to your client or upload it to their site.
You publish it, schedule the social media posts, and sit back with your hands in the air.
You look at the social media replies.
“Great stuff, but there’s a typo on line two.”
*head hits desk*
Sounds familiar? Has that ever happened to you before?
Because it’s happened to me and I hate it. I never want it to happen again.
However, when I talk with content freelancers I usually find that they don’t work with editors who can take one last pass at their copy to make sure it’s correct grammatically and free of typos.
These are small things that clients often won’t notice until you get it wrong, which can be costly. They may not stop working with you the first time it happens, but they probably will if it happens consistently and repeatedly.
Here are five reasons why freelancer content marketers should work with an editor.
Ready to take your content to the next level and make your clients even happier? Get an EditorNinja demo today.
Charge more for better copy
Are you tired of the constant asks to lower your cost or to meet the same cost charged by a freelancer with half of your experience?
Some prospects just can’t be helped (and you should politely decline to work with them), but there are others who get that great content is an investment, takes time to work, and is important lowering overall cost of conversion over time.
You know your content is top notch, but sometimes a mistake slips out to a client and makes both them and you look bad.
But what if that didn’t have to be the case?
What if you could send better copy to your clients and make more while doing it?
A lot of content marketers see editing as an expense, and often not one that you’re willing to invest in. But if you’re creating a lot of content (and editing it yourself), we think there is a better way.
Let’s say you’re producing 15,000 words of content a month for your clients. That’s ~15 blog posts. You’re spending ~5 hours on each, which means you’re spending ~75 hours a month just writing for your clients. You charge on average $350 for a blog post, which means you’re averaging ~$70 per hour writing. That’s not bad, but then you’re spending another 2 hours editing so your hourly becomes $50 an hour.
What if you could charge $400 per post, which is an extra $750 per month, and free up 30 hours a month of editing because you send your work to EditorNinja to get edited before you send it on to your client?
Not only have you made an extra $351 ($750-$399), but you’ve also freed up 30 hours of your time. That’s time that you spend getting more clients or just working less. If you choose to still work those hours and write blog posts, that’s an extra 6 posts or $2,400 you can make per month by outsourcing your editing to EditorNinja.
Wow.
Keep clients longer
Client retention is the name of the game for a service business like yours. The longer you can retain a client and keep providing them services, the easier it is to grow or simply maintain your business at a level you are happy with.
Doing subpar work is the number one cause of losing a client. According to the Agency Management Institute (yes it is a real thing):
The top reasons for firing agencies are that their work
Link
didn’t achieve the desired results (46%) and not receiving
the appropriate level of attention or responsiveness (31%).
“Kindred Spirits” and “Been Burned” respondents are
much more likely to cite a lack of results as a reason for
firing their last agency.
If you can maintain a high level of work quality, which in turn leads to better results, you stand a higher chance of retaining clients longer. Just make sure you’re giving them the attention they need!
Be more proud of the content you publish
I’ve been a content creator for a long time, blogging on the internet since ~2001 and writing my first novel at ~9 years old.
I still create a lot of content on the internet and share it widely. One of my least favorite things is when I’ve created a piece of content and publish it only to hear “Hey good stuff, but there’s a typo in the second sentence.”
ARGH.
This happens to me all too often, which is part of why I started EditorNinja (to solve my own problems).
You may not have that same problem, but do you ever write something and publish it only to later find a typo and feel ashamed of it?
If so, using an editor to review your content before it goes live can be a life saver. No more wondering if you’ve made a dumb mistake.
Spend more time creating rather than editing
As a content creator, don’t you prefer to spend more time writing than editing? I mean, it’s a fact that writing is a lot more fun especially if you ascribe to the quote most often attributed to Hemingway but most likely coming from De Vries:
“Write drunk, edit sober”
You’d prefer to spend more time writing than editing, so taking the approach of outsourcing your editing can free up a lot of your time as referenced in the first point above. We’ve even seen writers free up 20-30 hours a month of time that they were previously spending editing, just by outsourcing it to a person or service they trust.
Produce content better in step with your client’s brand guidelines
Finally, a great editor can make sure that your writing is consistent and in keeping with your client’s guidelines. This is why we allow you to share your brand guidelines with EditorNinja, so that our editors can make sure the content you’ve produced is in keeping with those.
In my time working full time in marketing, there were definitely instances where we failed to meet the client’s editorial standards and actually ended up being fired by the client a few times.
This is not a good look for an agency or a freelancer, especially with how challenging it can be to find and sign new clients.
So give yourself every leg up you can.
Ready to take your content to the next level and make your clients even happier? Get an EditorNinja demo today.