When to Hire Somebody to Write It

What a writer can and cannot supply

They can supply structure, clarity, consistency, and the discipline of finishing. They can turn a rambling explanation into a page somebody will read.

They cannot supply what you found behind a wall last month, what your customers actually ask, what fails on the housing stock in your area, or why you do something differently from the business down the road.

That distinction determines whether the arrangement works. A writer given a topic produces something researched from the same sources everybody else uses. A writer given your knowledge produces something nobody else can publish.

When to write it yourself

• Anything technical you know well, where the value is in the specifics.
• Explanations you already give verbally, which are effectively drafted.
• Anything about your own process or pricing.
• Short pieces, where the coordination costs more than the writing.
• Anything with a personal view, which reads differently when it is genuinely yours.

The second point is worth acting on. If you explain something to customers regularly, that explanation exists. Recording yourself saying it and having somebody tidy the transcript is faster than either of you writing it from nothing.

When to hire

• Volume, where the work is real and you will not get to it.
• Structure, where you have the knowledge and cannot organise it.
• Consistency, where several people have written pages and they do not match.
• Anything you have avoided for months, which is the honest signal.
• Editing rather than writing, which is frequently the better arrangement.

The last is under-used. A writer who takes your rough draft and makes it good costs less than one writing from scratch, and the result keeps what only you knew.

The arrangement that works

An interview rather than a brief.

Thirty minutes on a call, recorded, with the writer asking questions and you answering as you would a customer. They then write from that.

That produces material with your specifics in it and costs you half an hour rather than an evening. It also surfaces things you would not have thought to include, because a good question finds them.

What does not work: sending a list of topics and waiting. The output will be accurate, generic, and indistinguishable from a competitor's, because the writer had nothing of yours to work with.

What to give a writer

1. Who the page is for, specifically.
2. What you want the reader to do next.
3. The specifics only you have, including examples from real jobs.
4. What competitors say, so they can avoid saying it.
5. Anything you cannot claim, including regulatory constraints.
6. Two examples of writing you like, which conveys tone faster than describing it.

The fifth is important in regulated trades and frequently forgotten. A writer who does not know your profession restricts certain claims will produce copy you cannot use.

Judging the output

Three questions, applied to any draft.

Could a competitor publish this unchanged. If yes, it contains nothing of yours and the specifics are missing.

Is anything in it wrong. Technical errors are common when a writer works from research rather than from you, and they are your problem once published.

Does it sound like you. Not polished into something else. Customers meet the writing before they meet you, and a mismatch is noticed later.

The first question is the most useful and the one most businesses skip, because a well-written generic page looks like a good result.

The generated-content question

Worth addressing plainly, since it changes the economics of this decision.

Text can now be produced quickly at low cost, which makes volume cheap and makes generic content worthless faster than before. Anything a tool can produce from public knowledge is something a competitor can produce identically.

Which sharpens rather than removes the argument above. The defensible material is what comes from doing the work: your jobs, your area, your prices, your findings.

Where anything generated is used, it needs checking by somebody who knows the trade, because confidently wrong technical detail on your site is your liability regardless of how it was produced.

The realistic recommendation

For most small businesses: write the technical and pricing pages yourself, badly, then pay somebody to edit them.

That keeps the knowledge, costs less than commissioning, and produces pages a competitor cannot copy, which is the same extraction problem described in getting content out of people who do the work.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.