How Much Should You
Pay Freelance Writers?

While pricing content might seem arbitrary, getting it wrong carries significant risk. Pay freelance writers too much and you won’t have enough to make a marketing program sustainable. Spend too little and you’ll constantly be sourcing new writers who will need time to understand your tone of voice, your audience and a style that converts leads into buyers.

So how much should your company pay freelance writers for certain types of content?

This is the most common question we get here at nDash, and one that we’ve successfully answered for thousands of brands. So, to help you gain a better understanding of content rates and prices, we put together this guide based on 100,000+ real-world transitions in the nDash platform.

Before we dive in, here are a few things you should know about how this guide is set up.

First, the prices in this guide are not fixed. Ultimately, the amount you pay freelance writers will depend on multiple factors, including:

• Content length
• Turnaround time
• Research required
• Subject matter complexity
• Content calls
• Edits & revisions

Second, the prices are broken out by subject matter expertise. We’ll explain why this matters over the course of the guide, but for now here’s how they are defined:

• Technical Expert: Someone who has years of hands-on experience in a particular field that knows the topic inside and out. Examples: a former software developer, CPA or attorney.
• Topic Familiarity: Someone who knows the industry but doesn’t necessarily have the experience as a practitioner. Example: a cybersecurity writer with 5+ years of experience.
• Generalist: Someone with little knowledge of the topic or industry, but an excellent wordsmith. Example: a freelance writer who creates content based on interviews and/or outlines.

Lastly, it’s important to restate that the prices shown are averages based on actual transaction in the nDash platform, where we have writers in virtually all price ranges.

If you need help budgeting for your specific brand, be sure to create an account on nDash and contact our customer success team.

Let’s get started…

Designed to help a sales team educate prospects, sales collateral can take the form of one-pagers, brochures, solution briefs, user guides, and other types of product-centric content.

These too can vary greatly in terms of scope and length, but for this exercise we are going to assume a sales collateral project between 1,000 and 1,500 words, with 2 rounds of revisions.

Prices (average)

Notes: The prices shown here do NOT include design and layout work.

Pro Tips

• Templates: Like case studies, sales collateral is often highly templated. To avoid content “design gaps” be sure to share with the writer what the final deliverable will look like.
• Feedback: Consider having the writer get some feedback from a salesperson on how the asset can provide more value.
• Updates: Products tend to change a lot over time, so be sure to keep your sales collateral updated (with a freelance writer’s help) on a regular basis.

Many brands tend to keep sales collateral content in-house due to the extensive product knowledge that is often required. However, those that take the time to educate freelance writers on their products are able to scale this content production and focus on more strategic endeavors.

Promotional emails, drip campaigns and newsletters are highly effective in terms of engaging an audience, but they are also among the hardest forms of content to produce on a consistent basis, hence the need for a great freelance writer.

For this pricing, we’re going to explore what the cost of an email would be for a one-off email send (between 100-150 words).

Prices (average)

Notes: As you see here, the need for technical experts diminishes significantly for these types of projects.  

Pro Tips

• Stats: What emails have performed the best for your brand? How about the worst? If you can share some stats with the writer, it’ll help them craft an email that drives results.
• Tone: Emails generally call for a master copywriter, someone who can mimic your preferred tone, and not necessarily someone with deep technical knowledge.
• Subject lines: Have the writer deliver as few subject lines as part of the assignment, as this can often be the deciding factor on whether the email even gets read in the first place.

Emails are another type of project on nDash that generally comes in large batches, as opposed to one-off projects. The more deliverables you can send to a writer, the faster you’ll develop a rapport and the easier it becomes to scale this type of content production.

Keeping your social media channels populated and updated can be taxing to marketing teams, which is why many brands turn to nDash to pay freelance writers for compelling social posts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

Social media content almost always comes in batches of at least 10-50 posts, as it doesn’t make much sense to send a one-tweet project to a writer. Here’s what you can expect to pay for a batch of 20 social media posts.

Prices (average)

Notes: As with emails, the need for a technical expert rarely surfaces for social media content.

Pro Tips

• Images: Often, companies find it helpful to have the writer suggest images for each social post, as this can save a considerable amount of time (but may increase the price).
• Formatting: Be sure to have the writer deliver social copy in a way that makes it easy to copy-paste into the social publishing platforms.
• Stats: If you can share stats on which social posts performed the best, it will give the writer a “north star” for what to shoot for.

As with other content types that do not require deep subject matter expertise, social media content underscores the importance of having 2-3 writers on your team as opposed to one.

Website content projects have a wide variance on nDash. Sometimes the brand will need a complete overhaul where every page is written from scratch. Other times, they simply need a tweak of a few existing pages.

Aside from pillar pages, which are more like whitepapers in that they start at 2,000 words, the typical website project involves writing copy for one page, at 400 words, with 2 rounds of revisions.

Prices (average)

Notes: The prices shown here do NOT include design and layout work.

Pro Tips

• SEO: Give the writer a sense of your SEO requirements so they can work keywords into the first draft, as opposed to “keyword stuffing” them after the fact.
• Design: Website projects can be extremely counter-productive if the writer doesn’t have a good sense of the final design, as they may provide too much (or too little) content for the space.
• Branding: Considering engaging writers for site pages that are more informational and less aspirational, as not all writers are experts in branding.

Aside from great writing, the success of a website project on nDash is also attributed to organization and communication. For this reason, it might make sense to leverage the help of an nDash project manager.