Author: caseyekelly22

One of the biggest keys to running a successful business is cutting your costs as much as possible. So, it’s no wonder why so many business owners have this thought:

“Why would I hire a freelancer when I already have (X number of) employees?
Surely, one of them can handle an extra project here and there.”

Maybe so, but you probably won’t get the results you’re looking for. 

Freelancers are expected to make up about 40% of the U.S. workforce by the year 2020, and there are many reasons why! Here are six benefits of hiring a freelancer for your next big project.

1. Save That Money

One of the main reasons companies hire freelancers is to save money. Even with freelancers charging higher hourly rates than what an employee may earn, a business will save 20 to 30% each year by not paying for benefits like paid time off, health insurance, retirement programs and Medicare and social security taxes. 

2. Get High-Quality Work

Freelancers are running their own businesses, so they understand the value of delivering high-quality work to earn repeat customers and new clients. They’re not just going to phone it in as they work because they know they’ll get their paycheck either way. Instead, freelancers are more likely to go above and beyond to impress their clients and earn more work from them. 

Plus, it’s safe to assume freelancers actually enjoy the work they choose to do, which makes a world of difference in a person’s performance and product quality.

3. Say Goodbye Geographical Limitations

When you hire a freelancer instead of an employee, you aren’t limited by geography since most of them complete their work remotely. That means you can hire someone because you’re impressed by them and they fit what you’re looking for, not just because they live close by and were able to make it to the interview.

You’ll have access to waaay more options for freelancers to hire than employees, which brings me to my next point…

4. Find Freelancers With Specific Talents

You can be much more intentional and particular about the freelancers you hire compared to the employees you hire. Self-employed people typically have to specialize in something if they want to stand out, whereas employees must have many more skills and be able to handle tasks that might not necessarily fall under their job descriptions.

For example, if you need someone to complete a specific, essential task like redesigning your website or rewriting your website copy, you have two choices: 

• Pass it off to Jim from Marketing, who might not know the best approach. More than likely, Jim will spend a lot of time trying to figure it out ⁠— and postponing his typical duties ⁠— only to come to you a few days later to say he can’t do it. Or worse, he’ll do a mediocre job just to get it done, and you’ll have only a temporary solution that you’ll just need to fix again in a few weeks or months. 
• Hire a freelancer. Find someone who specializes in delivering what you need. The right freelancer will already know how to complete your project, and they’ll do so as efficiently as possible and deliver high-quality results.

5. Request Fast Turnaround Times

Hiring a freelancer is much easier and faster than hiring an employee. Usually, it involves one or two meetings (if that), and you could even conduct them virtually. There also isn’t as much paperwork or lengthy interviewing processes involved. 

For these reasons, you can hire a freelancer to deliver projects that require fast turnaround times. Some freelancers will be open to working on weekends and holidays in order to meet a deadline. Even if you have to pay a little bit more for a faster turnaround, you’ll know you’re paying for high-quality work that will be done when you need it.

6. Use ’Em When You Need ’Em

When you work with freelancers, there’s no requirement for you to fill their 40-hour work weeks with other tasks once a major project is complete. Use them when you need them, and save your money when you don’t.

Got a Project for Me?

Need to make some changes to your website? Shoot me a message to save some money and get stuff done!

Your website copy has a lot to accomplish. It needs to explain your purpose or goals, keep the reader interested and wanting to know more, represent your brand and values, boost your site’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERP) and most likely also convince someone to purchase a product or service. 

In order to accomplish all of these goals — and probably a few more — there’s really only one thing you need: GOOD content. But of course, this begs the question: What makes good content? 

Many factors will determine how effective or interesting a piece of content is. For this post, I’m going to hit on five of the big ones. 

1. Accuracy

Copy that’s littered with grammatical mistakes and factual errors is detrimental for many reasons, including that it: 

• Sheds a negative light on you/your company
• Makes you/your company seem less educated/reputable
• Decreases the faith users have in you/your company 
• Increases bounce rates, as most readers will typically leave a site with too many errors
• Can potentially result in lawsuits, customer confusion and complaints or other difficult situations depending on the severity of the error

Accuracy is number one on this list for a reason. No matter how insightful or “good” your content is, one error that’s bad enough can cause you to lose site visitors very quickly.

2. Organization

Whenever you can, use numbered lists, bullet points and subheads to break up your website copy. No one wants to read something that looks like an encyclopedia filled with blocky paragraphs and long sentences. 

The human eye naturally scans a website for readability before the user will even start reading the actual words. So, keep your copy as scannable as possible. Bold key phrases and ideas to satisfy scanning eyes and serve as little checkpoints throughout a post. Use the page’s most impactful, attention-grabbing snippets as subheads, pull quotes or even graphics. 

Don’t give readers the option to click away!

“Use the page’s most impactful, attention-grabbing snippets as subheads, pull quotes or even graphics. Don’t give readers the option to click away!”

– Too soon? Never.

Organization also involves the order in which you present information. Think about the best way to set up a blog post, website page or other content so someone who has never been to another page on your website can understand it. While this rule does have its exceptions, it’s almost always safer to provide more background information than less. 

3. Style

If your web copy reads like a textbook — or like every other one of your competitors’ websites — you will have a more difficult time connecting with readers. Your content should include some brand “flavor”, as well as use the appropriate tone for your audience and their buyer personas, which I’ll dive more into in a future post. 

To figure out the kind of style/tone you should adopt, ask yourself what’s unique about you and your company. Also, ask yourself what your audience needs from your content. Is it information? Support? A good laugh? Whatever it is, try to give your readers what they came to your site to get.

4. Readability

While your web copy should absolutely include keywords to boost SEO, it shouldn’t be a page full of a bunch of keywords. In reality, keyword-stuffed pages will actually do more damage than good, as today’s readers will find them difficult to digest and potentially scammy. 

The good news is that Google is getting better at finding smooth keyword insertions and ranking sites higher for better readability. Your copy no longer has to include key phrases exactly as users search for them. 

As an example, let’s say you’re targeting the keyword phrase “is renters insurance worth it.” 

Instead of saying:

“If you’re wondering, “‘Is renters insurance worth it?’, then contact us to learn more about its benefits.” 

… you could say something like:

“To learn more about why renters insurance is worth it, contact us today!”

See how that rewrite was a little easier to digest? 

Since Google now knows that copywriters must often rearrange keyword insertions to make them sound more natural for readers, your site will still rank for keywords even if you use a variation of them.

On top of this, Google’s crawlers — the bots that scan websites to determine SEO rankings and more — can now tell when your website is full of errors and confusing writing. By reading a sentence both forward and backward simultaneously, they can even tell if your copy is full of words that are unneeded to get your point across — aka, stuffed keywords, or just extra words used to boost a page’s word count. 

So, simply having well-written content on your website will also improve its readability and therefore its SEO performance. 

5. User Intent

Last and certainly not least — in fact, it’s quite possibly the most important — is user intent. What are users looking for when they land on this particular page? Think about what they’re searching that causes Google to suggest your website to them. Then, answer those questions as clearly and concisely as you possible can. 

You can take this a step further by then predicting your site visitors’ next questions and presenting them with a clear solution to what most people wonder after reading a web page: “What now?”

Always Include a Call to Action

In most cases, you can answer that question with a call to action. This could be to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your blog, download an e-book, request more information about your services, make a purchase — you get the idea.

So, since most of you are probably onto me already, I’ll keep this short and sweet… 

Subscribe to my blog below! Request more information about my services! Let’s give your site visitors that little push they need to start working their way through your sales funnel. Shoot me a message today.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton