Hey Brooke,

I’ll try and address your questions as best I can 🙂

“I’m curious about when you first outsourced content creation and what % of the price you quoted your client ended up being what you paid to the freelancers”

We pay 50% to the writers. That way, we’re still making enough and so are the writers. The main thing we’re concerned with is that the writers are happy with what they get.

Obviously they know that we make a cut on our end, so it just depends on whether they’re satisfied or not with their end. With 40 writers, it becomes a little tricky trying to keep everyone happy and there’s a constant flow of new writers coming and old ones saying goodbye for one reason or another.

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“How did you pay your freelancers to begin with and did you have any instances where you committed to a deadline for a client and your freelancer fell through? Any advice on avoiding that?”

Writers are paid once per week via paypal. Simple as that. Yes, we had so many situations where writers ended up disappearing completely and not returning the work. It happens and is part of the teething process when trying to scale a content biz.

We’ve gone through literally hundreds of writers over the 4 years since we started and it’s the one piece of the jigsaw that constantly needs refinement if I’m honest.

Having quality, reliable writers on board is the key – without them, then we wouldn’t have the kind of business that we have. Luckily, the writers we do have with us are all really cool people who are hungry for more work and also extremely reliable. Treat them well and they’ll return the gesture.

———–

“I’m interested in creating a niche writing content for a specific type of business (which I have a 14 years of experience working with) and I have a large network of people in that business so I feel confident I could source quality people (though the tough part is, if they aren’t traveling or looking to change careers it wouldn’t be worth it for them to take jobs that don’t pay as much as they are already paid in their career so I’d have to find people who’ve quit/are changing career focuses or who are between jobs at first until I could pay enough)”

As much as I dislike finding writers on Upwork and similar sites, they’re a great place to start the process I’ve found. Nowadays, we get referrals for both clients and writers – so it’s great to be able to hand pick who works with and for us.

I’ve found a lot of great writers in colleges/universities – so they’re well able to follow instructions and write well. They’re also in need of beer money come the weekend – so you can see how freelance writing is a nice side-gig for them 🙂

Stay at home moms and dads are another source of writers that have worked out pretty well for us to.

It’s all about thinking outside the box I suppose when it comes to finding writers to add to your setup Brooke. 🙂

Thanks Josie,

Yeah, once you get a foot in the door with some companies they tend to stick with you until you either stop writing for them, or they run out of work 🙂

It was always my aim starting out to build a team because I hate writing and it also allows plenty of scalability and growth.

I’m curious about when you first outsourced content creation and what % of the price you quoted your client ended up being what you paid to the freelancer?

How did you pay your freelancers to begin with and did you have any instances where you committed to a deadline for a client and your freelancer fell through? Any advice on avoiding that?

I’m interested in creating a niche writing content for a specific type of business (which I have a 14 years of experience working with) and I have a large network of people in that business so I feel confident I could source quality people (though the tough part is, if they aren’t traveling or looking to change careers it wouldn’t be worth it for them to take jobs that don’t pay as much as they are already paid in their career so I’d have to find people who’ve quit/are changing career focuses or who are between jobs at first until I could pay enough)

Cheers!

Brooke

Hey Josie,
Indeed – through curating these Financial Case Studies, I’ve learned that building a team seems to be the optimal way to scale up income (and ideally, scale down hours).

Yet another example of living on the road. I love it. There are a ton of ways to make it work!
As a freelance writer, I understand the content creation business quite well. I tried it out several years ago, using it as a stepping stone. I found some pretty good gigs, including a very lucrative one that lasted a year.
But I love that you took it a step further by hiring your own writers — and finding success. This is a great story!
Happy travels,
Josie