Not all of us are gifted in the writing department. Not all of us can be arsed to write content but if you want to be successful in the affiliate marketing game, you HAVE to publish good quality content at a decent volume. So, for those of us or haven’t got the skill, the time or the inclination to write content, a content writing service is a necessary evil.
Obviously, a content writing service is going to cost money and not everyone is making enough money from affiliate marketing yet to comfortably exchange cash for content, but sometimes there’s no alternative. So, we thought we’d do a bit of a test and find out what content writing companies are worth spending money with…
The very brief brief
We approached five content writing companies with the same brief;
Textun
Fatjoe
iWriter
Fiverr (bertwalston)
Rightly Written
We’d already done the keyword research to come up with article ideas, so I gave them the keywords and a title and they had to do the rest. The brief was simply:
“roof cargo box storage guide” – 1500 Words – Include link to relevant Amazon.com products.
THE BRIEF
It seemed pretty clear with no room for misinterpretation. Or so we thought. The results said otherwise with quite a mixed bag of submitted articles…
The Articles
TEXTUN
We’ve used Textun before and have always been pretty happy with the content supplied. It’s not award-winning but it does the job pretty well. And this time was no different. They took three days to deliver an article that was on spec and included five amazon.com product links and reviews. The article read well and flowed quite naturally, which is often hard to do when products are involved. It didn’t feel spammy or pushy and overall it felt like a good piece of content. They were almost spot on with the word count and it only cost $33.
You can read the article they delivered here:
FATJOE
We were pretty interested to find out more about FatJoe. We’d seen some ads pop up whilst we were floating around the Internet and they looked like a slick operation so we had high hopes, especially as they charge quite a bit more than some of the other content services out there. The delivery time was good – they delivered the article within four days. And it was pretty good. It read well, was logically presented and included some amazon.com links. But it wasn’t $70 good. At almost twice the price of Textun I guess we expected twice the quality, but it didn’t quite deliver.
You can read the article they delivered here:
iWriter
We’ve read good and bad things about iWriter and know that our friends at Income School rate them quite highly, so we were interested to see if they would come up with the goods. They didn’t. Not by a long shot. The article was delivered within twenty-four-hours, which you might not think is a bad thing, but you’ve got to wonder how good a 1500 word article is going to be if they can knock it out that quickly. Turns out they didn’t understand the brief and so delivered a pretty generic article about roof top boxes, not how to store your roof top box. The article was really badly formatted and came across and one long paragraph or text that would be a nightmare to cut and paste into your site. And it read really badly. It felt like one of those old school, spammy affiliate articles that the user would see right through. It was quick and cheap but also crap and un-usable. We were not impressed.
You can read the article they delivered here:
Fiverr (bertwalston)
Fiverr is a pool of freelancers, like People Per Hour and Upwork, so it’s about trawling through hundreds of freelancers and checking out their skills and rating to find someone you think might be a good fit. We found someone. He turned out to be not such a good fit. Again, he was quick and cheap, sending the first draft of the article back within twenty-four hours. But again, he’d missed the point and had written a general roof top box guide. We did go back to him and requested a re-write, which he did. The re-write came back and was exactly the same with a paragraph about roof top box storage tagged onto the end. The article felt spammy and we felt like we should have gotten more from someone who might care about and rely their ratings for future work. It was a bit disappointing and next time we’ll try People Per Hour and spend a bit longer looking for a decent writer that we might be able to build a relationship with over time.
You can read the articles they delivered here:
First Draft
Re-Write
Rightly Written
What a disappointment *slow shaking of head*. The website looks slick and they are at the higher end of the market, charging the highest rates. So, we ordered the article… and nothing happened. No confirmation email, no dashboard login, nothing. We sent an email asking if they had received the order and got a reply with a tone that smacked of attitude and annoyance. Now we’re pretty chilled here at WP Eagle but mean emails and bad customer service get our backs up. After a week we hadn’t received anything so we (politely) chased them again and were told that they had told us it would be two weeks so we would just have to wait. We waited and after two whole weeks we got the article. Admittedly it was quite well written, but they’d missed the point and written about roof top boxes and general. By that point we’d lost the will to live and couldn’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of asking them to re-write the article. It’s safe to say we won’t be using them again.
You can read the article they delivered here:
The Results – Who offers the Best Content Writing Service?
Here are the results in a neat little table…
- On TopicDid they deliver the article I actually asked for?On Topic
- SpeedA score based on the speed of deliverySpeed
- ValueA score based on price, speed and qualityValue
- Word CountNumber of words. I asked for 1500Word Count
- ReadabilityA score based on how well the article reads, in my option.Readability
- Overall RatingMy overall ScoreOverall Rating
Textun
$33
for 1500 words
- On Topic
- Speed4/5 (3 Days)
- Value5/5 (Good quality for a good price)
- Word Count1517
- Readability4/5
- Overall Rating5/5
FatJoe
$69.64
per 1500 words
- On Topic
- Speed4/5 (4 Days)
- Value2/5 (Good quality but expensive)
- Word Count1512
- Readability5/5
- Overall Rating4/5
iWriter
$21
per 1500 words
- On Topic
- Speed5/5 (24 Hours)
- Value3/5 (Below average quality but fast and cheap)
- Word Count1577
- Readability2/5
- Overall Rating3/5
Rightly Written
$75
per 1500 words
- On Topic
- Speed1/5 (14 Days!)
- Value1/5 (Good quality but expensive and slow)
- Word Count1489
- Readability5/5
- Overall Rating3/5
Fiverr
$23
per 1500 words
- On Topic
- Speed5/5 (24 Hours)
- Value3/5 (Below average quality but fast and cheap)
- Word Count1512
- Readability2/5
- Overall Rating3/5
We’ve learnt a valuable lesson about the brief. It needs to be more specific with no room for misunderstanding. It might seem obvious and clear to you but if you are sending a brief to a content writer, think about ways it could be interpreted and try and be as specific as you can.
Textun came out on top for us and we will definitely continue to use and recommend them.
Again, here are the articles if you want to see what was delivered by each of the services reviewed:
You can learn more about the companies by visiting their websites below
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject. What content writing services have you used, what are your experiences and which content writing service do you think is the best?
Comments
Good content. Thanks
As with all creative endeavours, it has to be the right fit and the first piece may miss the mark as you learn each other’s tastes, styles and requirements; from such a brief brief you got an unsurprising mix of quality, and that could be improved over time with better communication – which services such as these make more difficult as it becomes a case of Chinese whispers, passing information through a third party.
It’s also difficult to get the best work if the lowest price is one of your criteria – and having worked for some of these companies as a copywriter when I first started out, I always found it incredibly demoralising, as well as hard to earn a liveable income. Though you’re obviously willing to pay double figures a great many people approaching writers on those platforms absolutely are not. They are a terrible way to pair creatives with their market; copywriters (and other creatives) who work through these agencies are quickly put off the industry because it seems so hard to earn enough to survive AND people treat you like dirt, and the customers are also getting a terrible impression of the industry and the standard of work that a real professional can offer.
These ‘word farms’ have blinded some customers to the realities of professional expertise, and the true cost of outsourcing to skilled creatives. It undermines the whole industry, for both sides.
Thanks for your comments Eliza. It was good to meet you last night too! I completely understand your points, however, cost is a big issue for people that are trying to get a site up and running on a very low budget making using a “proper” copywriter difficult. Let’s get together for a chat soon!
Alex, good video and article. I’ve followed the Income School YouTube channel for a while and really enjoyed Ricky’s walkthrough of your niche site. I found this article after watching more of your videos. So, to make a long story short, I’m looking for a content writing service that can handle 30-40 articles per month. I’ve used iWriter in the past, but as you mentioned, the content wasn’t good. Based on these sample articles, I’ve ordered content from Textun and Rightly Written to see which one provides the best content for my niche. Hopefully, Textun works out because the price point is really good for building out a massive niche site.
Hi Kasey, thanks for the comment. Did you get some good content back? Let me know!
Alex,
Would love to have you consider using BKA Content. Been around 10 years, have a self-service option like this you can use. For 1500 words, there is an SEO article option for $81. I know that’s at the high-end range of what you have here, but pretty close. Would love to hear your opinion and rating.
Thanks for the comment, Matt. I’ll check them out.
Thank you Alex for a brilliant overview of content writers which was most interesting and being a new starter I will be putting Textun in my must have contacts for future content writing.
Glad you liked it 🙂
My first experience with iWriter was similar to yours. The article I had written was pretty bad and the revisions weren’t much better. I decided to try again with a different writer and got amazing results. He had very little experience on iWriter but did amazing work. He quickly became my go-to guy and I request him every time I use iWriter.
What I’ve learned from using content writing services is to be incredibly specific when giving instructions. Provide the topics for each subheading and give them a rough outline if you can. If you give them too much freedom with the topic or very little direction, you generally get poor articles…at least in my experience.
Alex-
RED ALERT! I just upgraded to WordPress 5.5 and bad things happened! Our business site, uphoto.com, was built a couple of years ago using a specialty “photo lab” template from Envato. After watching some of your videos, I decided to add an Amazon Affiliate Shop using WooZone to compliment our site and try to bring in related traffic to our “core” business. So far, so good and we’ve even managed a few sales and gotten our Amazon API keys.
Here is the issue: The Envato theme was supplied with WPBakery and that is what I used to create most of the content on the site. After watching several of your videos, I also added Elementor Pro to try a few tricks I saw you do to create Woo commerce templates. I created a category page for products ( https://uphoto.com/index.php/best-photo-gear/ ) for our SHOP. Since I already had over eighty pages done in WPBakery, I left both plugins active and they seemed to behave fine with each other. That is, until I upgraded to WordPress 5.5 a few days ago.
WHAM! WPBakery stopped working, and although all the pages I had done with WPB still “worked”, they could no longer be edited. The page editing interface was just no longer there. I tried a bunch of things I found online to no avail. That is, until I just now found a solution that fixed the problem! Now this is not so much a “resolution”, but definitely a fix so that everything works. The secret was a plugin called “WP Downgrade” that allows you to easily roll back to the previous version of the WordPress core. I know, not exactly a resolution, but certainly a fix. It’s got to be a problem with WPBakery, so I’m hoping they can resolve the issue and provide an upgrade.
I thought you might find similar problems and, while not the perfect solution, this certainly fixed the issue. I also wanted to let you know that I recently moved all of our web hosting of multiple sites from GoDaddy and Hostgator servers to Siteground (using your affiliate link, of course) and you were quite correct about the superior performance of Siteground over GoDaddy. The Uphoto site was taking up to 15-20 seconds to load on GD and on SG it loads in only 3-4 seconds. So, thanks for that. It also saves us about $70 per month over the three different hosting options we used to have at the other places.
If you have the time, I’d love to have you give our site a look. I’m sure there is a lot I could improve and would appreciate the feedback. And yes, I do have plans to write some “buyer’s guide” type articles and add some features with prominent “product placement” throughout the feature. Keep in mind that our main product line is custom photo lab services. Sadly, a line with a shrinking demand for those services, hence the addition of the SHOP.
I try to join your Tuesday streams every week and I get a lot from them. Your videos are wonderful, and fun to watch. You have really given me a lot of new ideas to try out, and I’ll let you know how the new affiliate shop performs. Not a tiny niche, I know, but on the upside many of the products are fairly big ticket items. So, there’s that! I have about sixty other domains I can create sites for. You may have created a monster.
Thanks!
Dave Smith
GM, U-Photo
Beltsville, Maryland USA
Thank you! I appreciate the review!