Robert Palmer: Freelance Writer

Your Small Business Can Compete with the Help of Professional Service Providers

Outsourcing to freelance service providers has really revolutionized the business world. Now even small businesses with extremely limited budgets can have access to same sort of creative services that were previously only available to big corporations with huge budgets. Part of this is of course due to the Internet revolution that has redefined the way companies must market themselves in order to succeed and part of it is due to the fact that that same Internet revolution has made it easier than ever to find (and hire) those niche service providers.

Years ago, if you wanted to rebrand your company or promote a product you’d have to approach an ad agency. They’d task their in-house copywriters, graphic designers, and sales managers with building a public platform for your company. In fact, with a little dramatization that same universe makes for great television (Mad Men on AMC explores the fictionalized personal lives of such Ad Men in days gone by.) The process was a pretty exclusive one because the agency was forced to charge high fees for the work provided in order to make a profit for themselves. Local production companies (often subsidiaries of local television stations or newspaper publishers) work much the same way. They have in-house production crews that work for the company, not for your business. While much of the content they create is solid and will get results, you still have to deal with a third party and the marketing message they give you may not be exactly the message you want to portray to the paying public.

Fast forward a few years and many of these same advertising agencies have laid off their in-house content creators and often hire outsourced freelance creators for specific projects. Why? Because these freelancers are often more cost-efficient for the ad agency and they are usually experts in a given field whereas in-house people tend to be Jacks of all Trades.

One Ad Agency’s Tale of Failure and Ultimate Success Through Outsourcing

A perfect example of this is Lancaster Advertising in Lewisville, Texas. In a USA Today article owner Ken Lancaster explains that he was forced to downsize his company, firing 15 employees and selling off his office space, in order to save the company. Ken now uses over 100 freelancers to provide his content. (And by doing so, his been able to increase his profits by 50%!) So I ask you this: Why deal with middlemen? It only raises the price of the service as those managerial types inflated their prices to pad their paychecks.

Take Responsibility for Your Business’s Marketing Message

 You, as a small business owner, now have access to a pool of extremely skilled service providers—thanks to the Internet—and can get better results for less money than you would get by working with an agency or local production company. This savings comes from the fact that these service providers don’t have to inflate their costs to cover managerial overhead. One example is, of course, copywriters. Copywriters can provide anything from training manuals to sales material and even website content for relatively little money. When you work directly with the service provider you’re afforded a host of benefits including:

• Personal attention and service
• Expert advice
• Top-Quality results
• Quick turnaround times
• Flexibility (an excellent attribute when you’re not exactly sure what you need.)
• And monetary savings

But just how effective can the content created by outsourced service providers really be? Why not ask any of the thousands service buyers who regularly use the outsourcing website Elance? Elance is responsible for over $310,000,000 in earnings and has over 169,000 expert service providers to choose from in fields ranging from copywriting and editing to legal services and graphic design.

In fact, that’s where Ken from Lancaster Advertising found his replacement staff! So before you resort to calling up your local TV stations creative services team or relying on the opinion of a jaded newspaper editor, why not consider taking the reins of your marketing message yourself? You can customize the content you need created to get exactly what you need and not have to pay an arm and a leg for it.

If you’d like to learn more about hiring a freelancer, read How to Hire a Freelance Copywriter and if you’re already in the process of doing so, you have to read 7 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Copywriter (or Any Freelance Service Provider) so you don’t end up paying for products you don’t want, like, or need. As always, if you think this article would be of use to anybody else, pass it on.