Youtube video transcript
Nobody cares about your website as much as you do. And whenever you take on a new writer, you are taking a huge gamble that the content they produce will not be up to the standard that you need. That’s what we’re talking about to date. So don’t go anywhere. Hello, YouTube and a special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil.
And welcome to my channel where I document my journey building on online income. If you’re joining me for the first time today, why not become a subscriber? Okay. So I have spent over $3,500 on content. And I’ve commissioned over a hundred posts to be written for two websites. Three in fact, and I’ve learned a lot from this experience.
Several months ago, I had a video where I spoke about how I actually hired local expats here in Taiwan. And I hired them through Facebook in order to build two sites at the time. And I’ve been working with around six writers since then. But last month, things changed. There were two real factors that changed how I dealt with my writers.
And the first one was as we’ve been going through several difficult months and I’ve actually suffered with my job. I haven’t had regular income since about April, so I’ve been dipping a lot into my savings. And the other thing was my most prolific writer. They suddenly changed the quality of the work they were giving to me.
But because I was so overwhelmed with all the projects that I have, I didn’t realize until it was too late. So I want to talk about my experience with that and hopefully give you some tips on how you can avoid it and not really risk your projects. Not. Spend money on things that are not gonna bring you the success that you need.
As I said, until recently, I was working with around six writers, some of whom wrote maybe one or two articles a month and others wrote a little bit more. But I had one writer who was really writing the bulk of all the content going onto my sites. And this was actually a guy that I knew personally.
He’s a member of the running club that I go to every weekend. And when he started writing for me in October within a couple weeks, he actually left Taiwan and he lives in Southeast Asia. He was traveling around, but I think he got stuck because of what happened in recent months. And to be honest, his work was always pretty good.
And he was earning. I think for about two or three months straight, I was paying him more than 500 us dollars a month, which is not a bad little side hustle for someone like that. Who was basically a traveling Noma head really. And yeah, his work was pretty good. There are always little typos here and there, but overall.
It was pretty much what I expected for the price that I paid. So just give you an idea of how much I’ve been paying. So for a response post, where I say to my writers you gotta hit around 1,500 words. I was paying them just under 30 us dollars, which for Taiwan is about the amount of money that a teacher teaches in a school like a kindergarten.
Or what they call a cram school here. That’s about how much you would get for an hour. It was sorry that’s that it was based on how much you would get for an hour. It was a little bit more than you would actually get for 60 minutes of work. And so I was expecting the level of work.
For that money I was paying. However, in the last couple of months, I started to notice a massive change in the quality of his work. Now he’s a native speaker, he’s from the states and I was reading through his work and it was just full of typos. It’s full of grammatical mistakes. And just the phrasing didn’t sound right.
I don’t know what he did either. He just stopped proofreading it, or he outsourced it to someone there who’s. His English was not their first language. And it just put me into a bit of a slump because I saw that and it was taking me nearly two hours to edit a response post. I could probably write the response post in less than two hours.
And to be honest, it just made me not want to do it. So for the last couple of months, the actual publishing schedule, I. For my websites, it’s gone right down. I didn’t want to do it. It just made me feel bad. It made me feel like I’d wasted my money. And the reason why I felt like that is because I took on a new writer.
This is actually Michael, my colleague, and we run the IOS grind YouTube channel. This is actually Michael’s girlfriend, who is a writer. This is her passion. She’s actually been published a few times, I believe. And just looking at the quality of the work that she gave me compared to the other writers.
It was like night and. Really it’s made me realize the mistakes I was making. So I just want to give you a couple of tips so you can avoid making the same mistakes as I did. So if I was starting again, this is how I would make sure I get the most out of my writers. The first thing is you’ve got to really set out clear rules and clear expectations for your writers.
So I did get all my. To sign a contract. And within that contract, we spoke about the fact that they had to produce original work. They couldn’t just copy and paste work. But the thing that I never really demanded was that they revised their work. Now, the reason why is because I knew from the start that I would be editing their work, I planned it in the way that they would write the outline sort of.
Get the ball rolling as it were for the post. And I would come by and edit it and probably add an extra 20% and go in a little bit more detail in different sections and really turn it into the best resource that it could be. Because I was doing that anyway, it didn’t really bother me that there were a couple typos here and there, but I would say make it very clear from the outset, what you expect, if you need them to give.
An error free document. You’ve gotta say that from the get go. The other thing is you’ve gotta leave yourself enough time to check for plagiarism. Now there are different free resources that you can use online. I have been using a website called Julee check.com, but to be honest, Talking to the Project 24 community.
There is no better way of checking for plagiarism than actually going through the document at random copying large sections and putting it into Google and to see if you get any exact matches. Now, this will only happen. Help you if it’s copy and paste plagiarism, if your writers are spinning content from elsewhere.
The only way to really know that is to know who your competitors are and to check your writing. So I actually gave my writers a list of some competitors, especially other Project 24 members that I knew were in the same niche. And I would say to them, do not look at these websites, do not use any information from these.
Not because it wasn’t good information, but because I didn’t want them to copy and paste or spin the content from other people, because I knew it would come back to bite me in the ass, basically. And the other piece of advice, which I can give you, which I think is probably the best piece of advice is not to take on too much.
Now you really do need time to keep up with the posts that are coming in. You need to edit them. You need to have time to read through them so that you don’t fall into the same trap as I did, which is to have so many posts coming in at once. You only have time to pay your writers and you don’t even get time to read the post before you’ve paid for it.
If you are doing that. depends on you obviously, but if I paid for something already, I wouldn’t feel that comfortable to ask someone to change it, to revise it. Probably I’m within my rights to do that, but I dunno, I’m not very good for, with a confrontation, to be honest. So make sure that you have enough time in your schedule to keep up with what’s being written, even if that means that you have less going on your sites.
Least, you know that it’s gonna be excellent quality when it does go up and you push that published button. And the other thing that I’ve come to realize, and that’s how I started this video is nobody cares about your website. As much as you do, you could pay the best money in the world to the best writers, but they still are only just doing a job.
They do not have the passion. They do not know how this is gonna change your life, change the life of your family. Just accept the fact that you are gonna get less than perfect quality. So your job is to go in afterwards and to put everything that’s written into your own voice to make sure the right vocabulary uses the right phrase for your particular niche.
And just to go through it and make sure that it’s something that you are proud to put your name on and to put out into the internet and to be. You are the only person that can do that. You can never find an employee. Who’s gonna be that passionate for. So over the last 13 months, I’ve learned a lot when it comes to producing websites, producing posts and trying to build on online income.
So I’m always trying to share what I’ve learned with you. So you cut the corner and not have to make the same mistakes as I’ve made or to get in the same. Difficulties I’ve made, but if you’ve got this far in the video, I have to admit that much of what I’ve learned has come from being a member of Project 24.
Now, if you dunno what that is, it is a course. That’s been set up by Income School. So Jim hammer and Ricky Kesler. And I cannot recommend it enough. Whenever I’ve had problems, I can go into the community forum and get answers to the problems that I have. Also, the training courses are just excellent and they’re always updated.
So if you really want to. Accelerate your journey building an online income. I can’t think of a better way than Project 24. If you want to check out a bit more information about that, there’s a link in the description. It will take you to a webinar which will explain everything that you need to know.
Okay guys, thank you so much for watching. If you’re not a subscriber. Please subscribe. If you have any comments, any tips for me, any suggestions, cuz I’m really learning a lot from my subscribers and my viewers, please leave me a comment. I always like getting them and I always reply when I can. I’ll see you guys in another video very soon.