6 Reasons WHY Hiring an In-House Writer is Worse Than a Writing Service

In the previous two articles, we covered why outsourcing your blog writing is a good idea and different outsourcing options. However, if you’ve got a large business or you need content delivered regularly, there’s a third option, which is hiring an in-house writer or an in-house writing team.

Naturally, hiring a dedicated in-house writer comes with plenty of pros, but it also has a lot of cons as well. For instance, even though you’ll have a writer or a writing team only creating content for your blog or business, it’ll obviously be a costly option.

Here are the cons of hiring a dedicated in-house writer:

• Limited Skill Set
• Higher Costs
• Limited Capacity
• Management and Training
• Limited Perspectives
• Risk of Turnover

Limited Skill Set

If you hire a dedicated in-house writer, you’ll be able to find someone who understands your specific industry and niche. That’s great and it means they’ll be able to create excellent content, but if you ever decide to branch out and create something slightly outside your usual scope, they may lack the experience and insight needed for that.

This can limit the types of content that your business can produce and it can lead to a lack of diversity in your content marketing strategy. In contrast, a dedicated content writing service has a team of writers with diverse backgrounds and various skill sets to cover multiple if not most industries and niches.

Higher Costs

Hiring a dedicated in-house writer is more expensive than outsourcing to a content writing agency or service. Your in-house writer will require a full-time salary, which depending on where you’re located, can cost anywhere from $35,000 per year to $65,000+.

In addition to paying a salary, businesses will probably need to provide benefits and working equipment such as a laptop and office space. If you go with a content writing service, you’ll only pay for the content you need, so you can avoid the added costs of hiring a dedicated employee for your content needs.

Limited Capacity

A dedicated in-house writer will have limited capacity as to what he or she can undertake in a given week or month. For example, if you need long-form content (say 1,000-word articles) 2 to 3 times a week, your in-house writer might struggle with researching the topic, writing, and proofreading in such a short time span.

What’s more, there’s only so much a single writer can do. If they need to perform the topic research themselves, they’ll have much less time to write the content and even less time to proofread it. On top of that, it’s never a good idea to have the same writer editing and checking the content due to personal biases. A dedicated proofreader (or editor) may catch things and correct them before the article gets published.

If you need to hire an editor or a proofreader on top of a writer, you’re now looking at paying two or potentially even three salaries. And that’s before we even get to SEO specialists. If you go with a content writing service, you’ll get a finished product because the service will have a writer write the content, an editor go over it, and an SEO expert tweak it for SERP optimization. All of that is typically included in the price, at least it is with Writingful, since we don’t have any hidden costs.

Management and Training

Hiring a dedicated in-house writer will also require your businesses to provide management and training to your new employee. This can be extremely time-consuming and can take up valuable time which would have been better spent on core operations.

In contrast, a content writing agency or service handles all aspects of content production, from management and writing to editing and quality control, allowing businesses to focus on running their business and not worry about content.

Limited Perspectives

Coming up with fresh, new ideas is often the most difficult part of content creation. Eventually, ideas dry up and you need to be really creative or inventive to keep coming up with something new.

A dedicated in-house writer might be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work involved in content creation since writing the article itself is only part of the entire process. Topic research and coming up with ideas are just as if not more important.

A content writing service that employs several writers can have them work together to come up with something unique nearly every time. What’s more, specialized writing services, such as Writingful, use Ahrefs to find topic ideas and potential content gaps which can be filled. Ahrefs is also excellent for finding low-competition keywords that will help your business rank high on SERPs for a wide variety of topics.

Risk of Turnover

Hiring a dedicated in-house writer comes with its own risks since you’ll be entirely dependent on them as an employee. Should they decide to leave the company one day, you’ll be left without a writer and therefore without content until you find a suitable replacement.

The conclusion is that unless your content writing needs are massive and you have the budget to employ a full writing team that consists of editors and proofreaders, as well as writers, you’re better off going with a content writing agency. Not only will you be happier with the content, but you’ll end up spending only a portion of what a dedicated in-house writer will cost.