One of the ways we’ve talked about before that you can grow your freelance writing business is to expand by bringing in subcontractors. There are a number of important factors that go into bringing in subcontractors, and we’ll explore some of the other implications over the next few posts.
Today, however, I want to look at the process of finding and hiring the right freelance writing subcontractors. Your subcontractors are, in many ways, doing work in your name. That means you want to take some serious care about who you hire.
The ideal freelance writing subcontractor will be:
- As talented a writer as you,
- Completely reliable when it comes to deadlines, and
- Work for about half your going rate.
Unfortunately, I’m convinced that the ideal freelance writing subcontractor doesn’t exist. In most cases, you’re lucky to hit two of the three criteria. If they’re a good writer and their rates work out to where you can hire them, chances are they’ll blow deadlines. If they’re talented and meet deadlines, you probably can’t afford them.
So, how do you find a freelance writing subcontractor that will work? There are several approaches, each of which has their merits:
1. Find a freelance writer you can mentor.
Let’s say you are looking to hire someone to write web copy. You can find a talented, reliable and affordable writer who primarily does articles or blogs, but who is looking to get into web copy. For a while, you’ll be able to continue to pay them an affordable rate, until they can charge higher rates on their own. In exchange, you’ll probably need to do some tweaking to the product, and do some teaching in terms of how to write that web copy. This all takes time, but you can still make it worth your time if you’re marking up the product price enough.
2. Work on a smaller margin.
I’m not going to pretend to tell you what the right markup is for your writing. It really depends on too many factors to list here. But if you can, let’s say, hire someone for 80% of your going rate, it’s not usually worth it – unless their copy is good enough that you barely have to edit it. If you can find a good writer who’s reliable, you might be able to pay them that kind of rate and then just sort of put your stamp of approval on the final product.
A word of caution here: don’t get too confident in any subcontractor. ALWAYS spend some time editing anything that you’re sending off to a client.
3. Live with uncertainty.
I don’t recommend this approach, because eventually it will come back to bite you. However, I know folks that have done it. In this approach, you find a good writer that you can afford, and you sit back and hope they meet their deadlines. You can do some things to encourage it – such as spacing their deadlines well ahead of your client deadlines – but ultimately it’s on you to deliver a product to your client when it’s due.
My personal preference is #1 above. The major downside is that I wind up going through mentees about every six months to a year. As they get up to speed, they become my competition and, eventually, I can’t afford them. In some cases, they move into a #2 situation, where someone I’ve personally groomed is now able to do the work in a top-notch fashion.
