Save Money on Niche Sites by Outsourcing Freelance Writing to the Philippines

When you find there is a freelance writer required to create content for your niche websites, you can save money by outsourcing. There are competent workers available in the Philippines. With its low costs-of-living, significant savings are available.

Suppose you need 10 or more 500-word articles to set up a niche web site. You need maybe 20 more articles to submit to article directories to create back links. If you are submitting via an article submission service such as SubmitYourArticle.com or UniqueArticleWizard.com, you need spins of the articles as well. (A spin creates unique-appearing, equivalent versions of your article. It may be constructed from equivalent, alternate titles, paragraphs, and resource boxes, such that any article created from the original article by randomly substituting alternative paragraphs will still be well written.) You may need 15,000 words or more, and you need many niche sites to earn a decent living.

An increasingly popular destination for outsourcing is the Philippines. Although different provinces have their own languages, English is used in commerce, government, the media, and education. There are a large number of colleges and universities, so a supply of educated workers is not a problem. Internet connections are widely available.

Manila, the capital, has 20 million people. Its "University Belt" contains nearly two dozen institutions of higher learning.

How would you outsource? One easy way is to put an ad in Craig's List for Cebu, Manila, or wherever. You can look through Craig's list to see what writing jobs are being advertised and what payment is being offered.

Since the Philippines' per capita domestic product is under 10% that of the US, there is ample opportunity to hire article writing and rewriting there at a significantly lower cost. The normal unit of writing is the 500-word article. I have had writers in the US quote me $0.50 a word, which would make the article cost $250. Actually, the going rate in the US is reputed to be more in the $10 to $20 range, $0.02 to $0.04 / word. At 10%, the cost should be $1.00 to $2.00 per article, or $0.002 to $0.004 per word, and there are jobs posted offering payment in that range. From another source, I hear that the going rate is more like $3 to $7 or $.006 to $0.014 per word.

Writers usually specify a higher amount. One, who linked to an example article that demonstrated excellent English, was requesting $6.00 for 500 words.

How well does this outsourcing work? Sources I trust are wildly enthusiastic about it. I will report my own experiences with it in subsequent articles.

Nevertheless, nearly everyone reports a lot of early frustrations in finding a good, reliable writer. Some tips: ask for and check references, request a test assignment of three articles on a topic you choose, always check for plagiarism with Copyscape or at least by feeding some sentences from the article into Google and seeing if there is an exact match.

Should we really be sending jobs overseas? In my case, the only American who would be doing this job is me, and I'll gladly pay not to have to do it.

If you plan to make money targeting small niches, you will find a freelance writer is required. Consider outsourcing some of your effort to a region of the Philippines where the quality of knowledge workers is high, and the cost of living, for the moment, is low.