I have a lot of copywriters in my network, and occasionally the question will come up as to whether a business owner like me should write their own content – particularly blog posts – or pay a professional specialist to do it for them. Although I’ve had a copywriter look at some of the pages on my site to suggest improvements – mainly the home and services pages – I’ve always written my own content. There are two reasons for this, one of which is decisive for me.
First of all, I want everything to have a consistent voice and tone. A good copywriter should be able to get close to how I write, but it’s unlikely they will be exactly the same (everyone has their own quirks and ways of wording things).
Second, I’ve been told many times by freelance clients and employers that part of their decision to hire me has been based on the strength of my writing. Sometimes this is because I’ve written a post that demonstrates my technical competence, or solved a problem very similar to the one they are having, but more often it’s down to the fact that I can express myself clearly in writing. This is a useful skill in general, but it’s also a distinguishing factor for me as many developers struggle in this area – particularly when explaining concepts to a wide audience rather than another developer. I do this because there are two audiences for my site:
Fellow developers: Usually looking for a solution, or at least assistance towards a solution, for a problem they are having. They are unlikely to hire me, but may recommend me later down the line. Explaining technical concepts clearly is important because they may have a different level of experience to me, not use English as their first language etc.
Decision makers: Looking to hire a developer to solve a problem. They want to know that I can solve technical problems, but also that I can explain what the problem is and how I’ve solved it in terms that they can understand. Blog posts help with this, but decision makers are more likely to be swayed by the home, about and services pages.
If I paid someone else to write my content, I wouldn’t be giving a true and fair impression of my skills in that area. It would also be a bit jarring if some posts were written by me and others by a copywriter, because I have a distinctive writing style (as do most people in my experience – I nearly applied to do a PhD on detecting who authored a piece of text based on machine learning).