We Ordered the Same Article from 5 Content Creation Services: Here Are the Best Ones (…and The Ones You Should Avoid) Free Template : The Question
Want to know what people ask me about more than almost anything? Outsourcing content.
It’s a major pain point for lots of marketers, and it’s one of the most difficult hurdles to jump when start to seriously scale a site.
For most people, one of the most crucially important things to get right when building a content machine is finding a good, reliable source for content that allows you to scale.
I did, and my site took a massive jump forward (I’ll tell you which one of these I use for most of my content below).
Of course, not all content agencies are created equal, so we put them to the test. We gave 5 agencies the exact same assignment and let them duke it out. How’d it go? Let’s find out…
Why Test Agencies?
Mostly because finding a decent agency and getting good content out of them is a pain in the ass.
There are major upsides to using agencies (e.g. they’re scalable, easy, and sometimes even cost effective), but, of course, there are plenty of downsides (mostly that it’s difficult to get truly great writing out of them).
So, this test has two main goals: (1) to help you find agencies that provide the most benefits with the least drawbacks, and (2) to help you understand how agencies operate and how to get good work out of them.
In other words, we want to see which agency is closest to the perfect agency. For me, that means an agency that:
Is easy and scalable;
Is relatively cheap ($/article);
Provides quality content; and
Does well with suboptimal article briefs
Reason #2: No one’s done it. To my knowledge, there’s no good resource on this yet. We weren’t able to find any good case studies comparing the popular content agencies, and I think it’s a really important thing for you guys to know.
That’s a problem because when I was looking for ways to scale content, I had to try all of them one by one. It was a huge hassle, and I got a lot of crappy work.
Reason #3: Content agencies all look the same. From the outside, agencies all make the same claims. It’s difficult to tell how they really work. It’s even more difficult to know what kind of content you’ll get.
Even the basic stuff is hard to find without actually going in and ordering articles. Will you have a project manager? What’s the cost? How long does it take an article to be delivered? What’s the quality assurance process?
So, at it’s heart, this post is three things: a case study, a collection of reviews, and a good ol’ fashioned competition.
some cases, however, because some of these agencies operate very differently from the rest. TextBroker and iWriter, for example, are 100% pure marketplaces, and there is very little human interaction, while at WordAgents, you have a dedicated project manager.
Still, we tried to keep the process as similar as we could across the board. To that end, we set up three essential rules for this experiment.
Rule #1: Give everyone the same assignment.
Everyone got the same assignment. It’s a short, informational article. Here are the requirements. professional resume
Topic: “Why Do Cats Purr?”
Length: 700-1000 words (as close to 800 words as possible)
Paragraphs no more than 3 lines long
Include a link to one relevant video
Include sources for your facts
Here’s one of the important things to note: the brief I submitted is more vague than normal. That’s on purpose. To really get a good feel for how well these agencies do their jobs, it’s not fair to give them the best possible brief. I want to see who can fill in the gaps.
That said, I think this is still a B+ brief, and in hindsight, I should have actually made the brief worse. Hopefully, I still left enough wiggle room for the good agencies (and writers) to show their stuff.
Rule #2: Work within the system they provide.
As much as I can, I’m going to work within the systems set up by the agencies themselves. No more. No less.
I’ll use their submission systems. I’ll use whatever writers they give me. I’ll use their customer service system (if they have one and if needed). And I won’t go beyond that if I can help it, unless…
…Unless an agency representative specifically seeks me out to do so. For example, one agency (you’ll see below) sent me an email asking if there was anything they could help with for my first project. So I chatted with them a bit more, and they get a bit better feel for my project.
In other words, if they give me access to their personnel as part of their system and workflow, I’ll use it. Otherwise, I’ll simply go through their CMS like any other customer.
Rule #3: I won’t ask for any revisions.
I toyed with this rule for a while. On the one hand, revision systems are an important part of any agency. If you get content you’re not happy with, you need to be able to send it back and get it revised.
However, this article is really an addendum to our previous article on content automation, and I’m assuming most people want to use content agencies to scale.
And at scale, you won’t have time to revise many articles. You’ll either be paying someone to do it or simply relying on the quality of the agency to get good content you don’t have to edit much.
So I decided not to ask for revisions. Instead, I think it’s more useful for our particular problem (scaling a website) to find out which agency does the best job on the first try.
