Thinking Of Hiring A Ghostwriter? First Decide What Your Goals Are

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As the concept of article marketing gains wider acceptance as one of the best ways to build traffic and brand businesses or individuals as experts in their certain fields, more and more people are looking to ghostwriters to write online articles for them. But the success or failure of hiring a ghostwriter may very well depend on what the client’s goals are before the ghostwriter is hired.

First let’s quickly explain what article marketing is. Hundreds of article submission sites have sprung up on the web that allow authors to publish articles and give permission to other webmasters and newsletter publishers to reprint these articles for free. The only restriction is that the webmaster or publisher must not edit or change the article in any way.

This includes leaving the original authors’ “resource box” which is placed at the end of the articles intact. The resource box contains information about the authors’ business and links to the authors’ websites, so each time an article is reprinted, it is as if the author gets a free ad placed on that new site.

It is the ultimate win-win arrangement because the webmasters get free content and the authors get exposure and possibly hundreds of links all pointing back to their websites, which creates traffic to those sites and raises the sites’ search engine rankings.

But the problem is that writing the 100 or so articles necessary to make article marketing such an enormously effective strategy, takes time and writing skill, something not all business people have.

Enter the ghostwriter. A good ghostwriter can produce original articles that, once the client has paid the writer’s fee in full, become the property of the client. These clients can now their names on the articles and claim them as their own.

Ghostwriters charge a very wide variety of fees for their work. In a recent article called, Why Hiring The Cheapest Ghostwriter May Be More Trouble Than It’s Worth, one business person’s experience with a ghostwriter who only charged $10 per article is described. When this client got the articles back, it was clear they were not written by someone who wrote English as a primary language and they had to be completely rewritten in order to publish them.

And although I personally would never work for $10 per article, I can’t deny that to some clients it might be worth getting articles from that type of ghostwriter.

If you goals are only to get inbound links, cheap writing services may be the way to go. However, it should be considered that even if the article submission sites accept these articles, it is doubtful whether other webmasters and newsletter publishers will reprint such low quality content.

This of course, defeats the very purpose of using article submission sites because you want each article go “go viral” and create dozens or hundreds of inbound links. These other sites will only republish articles that offer quality content to their readers.

The other goal clients might have is to not only create lots of inbound links, but to also brand themselves as experts in their fields online. This requires very high quality articles that these business people will be proud to put their names on. A poorly written article with choppy or awkward syntax reflects badly on the person whose name appears on it.

To people who want to become recognized authorities in their fields, high quality articles are the only option. Sacrificing one’s reputation for the sake of getting a lot of links is foolish for someone whose good name is essential to doing business.

So before you hire a ghostwriter, consider your own needs and goals. If you simply want lots of content written and the quality of that content is not a high priority, use any of the freelance work exchanges on the web. But if you must have high quality work, check out writers who already have a presence on the web, whose work you can see, and who have track records for delivering excellent content.

After all, you get what you pay for.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

Charles Brown is freelance writer with an unhealthy curiosity about nearly everything. He has used article marketing to promote a number of internet businesses. If you must, you can visit him at his Squidoo lens, http://www.squidoo.com/articlemarketing4traffic Getting Targeted Traffic With Article Marketing

Tags: freelance writer, ghost writer, ghost writers, ghostwriter

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