Youtube video transcript
Hi, welcome. My name’s Phil. I’m the income school student. And today we’re gonna be talking about hiring writers from Facebook. So stick around to find out. So in case you didn’t catch my last video, I was talking about the fact that last week I launched two new websites and this is because coming into 2020, I’m going for a multi-site strategy.
And in order to do that, I need to hire writers. It’s not something I’ve done before. And luckily I’m a member of Project 24, which was set up by Jim harm and Ricky Kesler over at income school. And it teacher. Everything you need to know about being an internet marketer, one of the courses, and there’s about 16 courses within Project 24, 1 of the courses is all about hiring writers and it’s a very useful course.
And it teaches you from the start to the end of the process. Everything you need to do to get the right kind of writers to produce the right kind of content on your website. And I’ve slightly gone in a different direction with that. What I’ve done is I’ve hired local writers from where I live in Taiwan, the reason I did that is because my budget is finite and I wanted to work with people that perhaps I could meet in person and have a bit of a closer relationship with, and obviously I’m gonna pay less money.
So that’s also a big factor. So the main thing about this course is hiring writers. Is this sort of filtering process very useful? So in this video, I just wanna talk about my experience of hiring writers for Facebook and maybe this is an option for you too. Okay. So let’s go through it.
How exactly did I hire the writers that I have so far? The first stage and the most important stage is to do your search analysis, prepare your hit list, get a list of articles or the headings that you want. And. First, but of course I didn’t do this first. I did this second and it was a big mistake. The main reason that I didn’t prepare all this in advance is that, yeah, I’ve never hired writers before.
I’m a little bit of a control freak. I didn’t want to rely on other people. I didn’t wanna release too much information about what I was doing in case someone copied me, but I simply cannot do what I’m planning. D with all these websites, I’m planning to launch four websites before 2020. I cannot do this on my own.
So I need other people to write for me. So I egged myself on and I just wrote the ad and put it onto the Facebook groups because I didn’t really think anyone would respond. But people did. And then I had a mad rush to try and get all of the articles planned out with the where headings and a certain analysis.
I could send it to the writers who applied. So do this before you do anything else, just go through, take your time, get good headings and make sure you’re choosing the right posts. And then you move on to the next step. So the next step is to write the ad. So you want to be very clear about the role that you are hiring for.
So what does the right have to do? You have to be very clear on exactly how much you’re gonna. Them. So you need to plan the pay scale and you need to just outline all the anticipation that you have and the expectations, I should say, rather than what you have of the writers. When it comes to the pay scale, ordinarily, you are probably gonna pay somewhere between 3 cents.
So us dollars, 3 cents and 30 cents per word that is the going rate. However, I found that if you work with. Spas in slightly less. I don’t know. Affluent countries. I don’t know the cost of living lower. So in Taiwan, the average wage is much lower than the average wage in other places. Now, some people will say, oh, that’s not fair.
You can’t, you shouldn’t pay people less money for the same work, but hear me out. Okay. So I’m a teacher here in Taiwan and I earn a certain amount, an. What I did is look at how much I earned and how much the average wages for a teacher. And I placed my fee somewhere in between. Now, when I say somewhere in between, I earned maybe one or two us dollars, equivalent to more than the average.
So it’s not like a big difference. So I thought if you’re earning this amount of money for an hour in a classroom with kids, it’s fun. Said to spend an hour writing. So I thought that’s a fair deal. So that’s why I went for the price. I was planning to actually pay the same amount of money as I earned, maybe a little bit more, but my wife being Thai, we Taiwanese she said lowball them now.
I’m not saying that Taiwanese people are bad, but they are low balled in price here. They earn a lot less than they should. I’m quite happy with the price. And it turns out that other people are happy with that price too. So this is the biggest thing you’ve gotta decide. How much are you prepared to pay and will people be willing to accept it?
In most cases they will. But that might mean the quality of the writer is not what you are expecting. So it’s a bit of trial and error, and sometimes you might have to raise that price, but yeah. So write your ad and put all the details down now. I had a video that I created because I wanted to show that I was a real person and I wanted to show people that I wasn’t gonna scan them.
I was just someone they might know from the pub or something like that. So if you are able to do this, create a video just to show you what I did. It was very simple. This is the video that I made. So it wasn’t very long. Hey guys, how’s it going? My name’s Phil, and I’m gonna be launching a couple websites soon, and I’m basically just looking for some freelance writers.
So if you think that you’re the sort of person that can research a topic and then write a pretty good answer to that topic, then you are the person that I’m looking for. So just a few sort of. I’m only looking for native speakers. I know that there’s lots of you out there that speak English very well, but I just wanna look for someone who is a native.
So sorry about that. I’m also gonna be paying you through PayPal, so you need to have a PayPal account. And don’t worry if you’re not too sure if it’s gonna work out, because even if you write your first post and I don’t end up hiring you, I’m gonna pay you for that first post. So don’t worry if you just wanna try out and see if it’s a good fit for you.
The only other thing is that I’m only gonna work with people based in Taiwan. This is because ideally I’d like to meet you so I could. Give you a few tips and maybe help you with your writing so that my websites can be as helpful as they can for my users. Just read the instructions below.
And if you think it’s a good fit for you, send me an email to make sure that you read the instructions carefully, because if you don’t send me the right information, I will not be considering you for the job. So thanks very much. And maybe we’ll be working. In their future. So thanks for watching.
Okay. The next step is once you’ve written the ads, you need to filter out the applicants. If you are doing some Facebook, then you may not get as many applicants as if you were doing this through something like up work or some sort of writer’s job board, but you need to use the same kind of method.
What I mean by filtering out is I put an instruction at. My ad said, please send me an email and I will only respond to emails. And I put my email address there. I also said in the title, please put your home country, cuz I only wanted to recruit native speakers. I said, put your home country and this phrase so you can choose any phrase you want.
I decided to choose type 1 0 1 because that’s the biggest building here. Taiwan. And it was just so it would’ve been UK Taiwan type a 1 0 1. And if I didn’t see that title in the email, I didn’t open it. I just deleted it. I also said that I would not respond to comments and I would not respond to private messages.
So another reason not to respond to comments is that you are always gonna get trolled. So I, I. Add on. And the first comment obviously was someone saying, oh, how can you expect people to accept such a low salary? I could find a writing job within 15 minutes with seven times the amount.
And I’m thinking this is good money. If you can find a writing job seven times what I’m charging. Yeah. Good luck to you. But it you’re gonna. So my advice is don’t read the comments because it’s just gonna upset you. It upset me. It made me feel like I was a bad person for trying to do something with my life, basically.
Yeah. So just ignore comments, ignore private messages. I even had acquaintances of mine, who sent me private messages. I didn’t respond because if they do not follow your instructions, you do not wanna work with them. So that’s why the filtering system works. Thing that I asked them to do was to write a hundred words on a topic.
The topic was why they enjoy living in Taiwan. It’s just something that you can see very quickly if their grammar correct, if they can spell well, if they have a good tone of voice. So I just skim through these things and sometimes people would say they were a native speaker and they clearly weren’t.
So it’s a good way to out the people you don’t wanna work with. So the next step is something that only really works in the way I’m describing it. If you are in Project 24, because in the how to hire writers’ course, Jim or Ricky had prepared two brilliant training videos for us. They go through, what’s known as the post recipe, how to write a post in order to optimize it for on page SEO, as well as other things that we learn about in project 20.
Not gonna talk about those because I’m not allowed to. But these are two really good videos. And in the videos they’ve got secret words. So basically throughout the video, Jim and Ricky will just say, okay, this is a secret word. Tell this to the person who’s hiring it. So I sent my writers or my applicants.
I linked to these two videos and all they had to do was come back to me with the three secret words. And once they did that, I gave. Heading, I gave them some instructions of what I expected from that post. I learned how to do this after the first couple of times, because basically people are not familiar with the way that we write posts in Project 24.
So I gave them a little bit of extra help. And I said to them, send it back to me. I’m gonna run it through a plagiarism checkup. If it’s not plagiarized. I will pay you whether or not I use that article. I’m gonna pay you. And I think that’s fair enough. Because at this stage you don’t know if they’re going to screw you over.
They don’t know if you are gonna screw them over. So I wanted to make a point of, you’re gonna get paid. And I did, they sent me the articles. I checked it with a free plagiarism checker, which I’ll put a link to in the description, cuz I can’t remember the. I think it’s Julee checker.com, something like that.
So I just ran it through that. If it passed, I sent the money through paper and it worked and the next stage was for me, what I would do was I’d go through it and edit it. I’d put the article into my own voice. I checked spelling, there’s a few spelling mistakes here and there, a few grammar errors here and there, but I’ve got.
Emily plugin. So it’s really easy to do that. I’d format that on page and I’d publish it. I would then send the feedback to the writer. Most of the feedback was to do with the structure, particularly with the post recipe. A lot of people don’t get it the first time I’ve written 61 posts on my main project, 24 websites.
And I know how to do this now. And so I just gave them the. Give them some examples. And for the two writers who wrote me a second article, they did it much better than the first one. So that’s how you do it. And yeah, I was a little bit scared about hiring writers. To begin with, I found that by working with people through Facebook groups.
Yeah. I think I’m quite happy with the results. So just my sort of impression of the process of hiring writers, the major thing that I’ve learned is that no one will care about your website as much as you will. And if you are paying less money, you can’t expect more work. So you’ve got to help the writer out as much as you can, and you’ve got to reduce your workload as much as you can later on. So the best way to do this is when you are preparing your hit list, do some research on each article, go through and just pick out some ideas that you would write about that you think would push that article above the competition.
Because the problem is, if you give a writer, who’s never done this before a title, they’re just gonna. Search it on Google and they’re gonna scrape the information from the other websites. And that’s not what you want. You want something else, but you can’t expect someone, for 30 bucks. To spend hours and hours on a 1500 word article and do lots and lots of research.
But if you do that yourself beforehand, I think that you’re gonna get better results. So that’s what I’m gonna do. Moving on to the future. I’m gonna prepare a little bit of research for each of the articles, make a very clear set of instructions, then send it out with the post heading. And I think it’s gonna reduce my editing later on.
I had a couple of problems with the writers. A few times people just ran out of steam at the end, and I had to add a lot more information. Also I had an issue with one writer so she was a female writer and I gave her the post heading and she wrote everything from a female perspective, but my name is going to be on that article.
And obviously I am a guy. Yeah, so I had to go through. Everything out. Sometimes you have to remind people, you can’t just write it from one point of view. You’ve gotta consider both sides of a story, make it more accessible to all types of users. And, people just forget that if they’re new to writing.
But it wasn’t a major problem. It didn’t take me very long to fix. So that’s my advice: just anticipate mistakes that people will make. And. Of as many resources as research, I should say, as you can beforehand, this is gonna produce a lot better articles and a lot less work for you. If you wanna find out a little bit more about my journey with the writers, I’m gonna be updating you periodically through videos over the next couple months.
So just subscribe to the channel, hit the notification, be that way you’re not gonna miss out on any information. I hope you found this. If you did share it with some friends, also, if you’ve got any questions, just leave me a comment, I’ll get back to you. I might even make a video just for you, if it’s a really big question and I’m here to share my experiences.
If I can help you out at all, that’s gonna be great. If you are interested in becoming a Project 24 member, just as I am, then you can use my link. And I would really appreciate it if you could check out the link. Description there, or you can go over to my website at income school, student.com/Project 24.
So thanks very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.