Article Writers: The Different Types and How to Make The Most of Your SEO Budget 

A consistent content creation pipeline is one of the most valuable assets that any business can have. Content provides businesses with a platform that can be used to share a particular vision and directly encourage organic growth. 

As a small or medium-sized business, competing against bigger enterprises for brand awareness and market share can be difficult. Using article writers for your content marketing efforts is one of the best ways for smaller businesses to develop their brand reputation and increase their market share.

All businesses face a level of competition. Differentiating your business, whether through your vision, culture, pricing, or unique selling point, will make all the difference in establishing authority and expanding your business presence. By creating content, you will appear higher in search engine rankings for keywords related to your business and you will help your customers understand you. 

Helping your customers find and understand you should have an incredible ROI (Return on Investment). But, what is the initial investment behind content creation, and what is the best way to optimize your SEO spending? 

There are various ways to produce content and many different types of article writers, so it is critical to consider the financial and time investments required for any work you want to complete. Taking opportunities to optimize content creation can have incredible returns, both in terms of the content results, but the time you have to work on other parts of your business. Therefore, it is important to weigh the pros and cons of each content creation option:

Writing Your Own Articles 

Pros 

When it comes to your business, it’s perfectly normal to feel as if you want complete control of your content creation. Having a plan for your content is expected, so if you already know what you want to write about, you will almost definitely be the best person to get exactly what you want. 

Additionally writing yourself costs no money, only time. So, writing your own content (particularly at the start) may be necessary for people with lower SEO budgets. 

Cons 

With the advantages of writing your own content in mind. It’s also important to remember that writing your own content is massively time-consuming and does not scale. You need to plan out your content, research the topics, write the article, and optimize it for search engines. 

The manual writing process may be fine for one or two articles per month, but that is not enough to develop your brand. However, if you spend too much time writing, the truth is that you have to sacrifice significant amounts of time from all other aspects of your business/life. 

Content is important, but neglecting everything else to focus entirely on content creation could lead to dramatic adverse effects both in the short and long term. Hence, why using some form of article writer is such a popular option.

Another drawback of writing your own content is that sometimes you won’t know what to write about or how to frame a specific topic. Whether it’s writer's block, boredom, tiredness, etc., there are many reasons why you may not feel like writing. There’s nothing wrong with this, but this is not an option when you write your own content as you need to be highly efficient and produce content at scale regardless of how you are feeling on a day-to-day basis. 

Working With a Staff Article Writer 

Pros 

Hiring a staff article writer is a good idea because they will finely tune into your brand goals and the overall “bigger picture” of your business. They will learn how to shape your content so it’s perfectly aligned with your content and business strategy. 

There is also the considerable benefit of consistency. Hiring a staff writer means that there will typically be some form of agreement or contract in place. In other words, they will be required to produce a certain level of content consistently. Overall, staff writers are reliable and a solid option for larger brands with a particular niche style and focus.

Cons 

Unfortunately, hiring staff writers is extremely expensive. Not only are they usually paid generously, you will also need to give them incentives. High-quality writers who know how to optimize content for organic search are in high demand, so bonuses and gratuity payments for strong content are somewhat expected.

Additionally, staff writers are not always agile - they often struggle to adapt to new topics quickly, so you might receive content that requires a long editorial process. Not only does this mean a lot of additional time spent creating content, it also makes it far more challenging to scale. 

Further, hiring new in-house staff requires an intense vetting process and firing is a last resort. Therefore, it can be a major headache to adapt to evolving goals. 

Finally, any human writer will take a decent amount of time to produce a first draft, not to mention editing and revising their content. Turnaround times get even longer considering that the human writer will have to manually make high-quality SEO optimizations.

Hiring a Freelance Article Writer

Pros

Hiring freelance article writers is a solid option for smaller websites that want to create content on various topics. It’s cheaper and more agile than hiring in-house writers. It’s also far easier to hire or let go a freelancer as there are no associated legal obligations.

Freelancers can cover more topics than in-house writers (as you can hire multiple experts to create content on separate topics). 

Cons 

With freelance writers, it’s difficult to control quality without spending huge amounts of time editing the content. 

As a blogger or content manager, you will continuously find, vet, hire, and manage new freelancers - this can be hugely time-consuming and difficult. Unless you hire an assistant you will also need to manually publish the content and build internal links throughout your articles.

Finally, there is less accountability among freelancers, which can cause even longer turnaround times and you have zero guarantee that freelancers will optimize content for search.

Using an AI Article Writer 

Pros 

Using an AI writer is the best option for creating content at scale because it’s significantly cheaper and faster than hiring any human writer. Additionally, it’s way easier than writing your content yourself - AI writing tools like Article Forge have their own built-in research mechanisms. 

As a result of this, Article Forge’s AI article writer is also the most flexible option for people looking to quickly create content on a multitude of topics. Instead of having to conduct a LOT of research, or hiring a bunch of freelancers, an AI article writer can indeed produce high-quality, unique content on any topic. Not only is Article Forge content automatically generated with less than 15 seconds of “work” but it’s also naturally optimized for search. Content is structured in a way the AI knows search engines like by default.

All in all, the right AI writer allows users to create content at a scale that would be impossible for any human. This content is well researched, and structured and generally provides significant value for readers.

Cons 

There is a negative connotation around AI writing - this is a bit of a misconception. Google says it does not condone AI content, but this is a massive oversimplification. In fact, what Google wants to penalize is useless content that prioritizes search engines at the expense of helpfulness to real human beings. Therefore, it is important to only ever use AI article writers that provide valuable, relevant, and helpful content.

Given the need to create helpful, accurate content, it is critical to understand that not all AI writing tools are created equally. 

Some AI writing assistants will not save you much time at all and will require significant prompting to produce any content, other AI writers simply don’t produce great results (this is what Google hates). However, when you use a true AI writer built on it’s own research mechanisms, you will be able to generate content at scale indefinitely!

Although an AI writer provides users with the means to effortlessly create content about whatever topic they want, this is not the best way to use an AI writer. You still need to keep Google’s ranking algorithm in mind, by this we mean create cluster content, that is where your articles are naturally related to each other e.g. 10 articles about different diets.

Why Use an AI Article Writer?

So we have already addressed the value of using an AI article writer to create content, but there are a couple of other misconceptions we would like to address. Firstly, you may think that an AI writer is difficult to use and still requires human involvement.

This is not accurate.

You may be thinking of AI writing assistants. These are AI based tools where you will write a brief/outline and prompt the tool. For example, you might start by writing a sentence and then allow the AI to expand on the content by writing another few sentences. This works, however, it’s not a fully automated solution.

On the other hand, a true AI article writer, like Article Forge, only requires a single keyword to generate entire articles up to over 1,500 words. Suppose, you entered the keyword “how to make iced coffee” a true AI writer is capable of creating a full blog post on this dedicated, niche topic.

If you’re hesitant about relying upon an AI writer to create all of your content that’s understandable, but the beauty of using a complete AI writer to create your content is that it can be compounded with all the other methods of content creation.

For example, some of our users utilize Article Forge for some of their articles but also hire freelancers to create more brand-focused content. The combination of both allows them to massively increase production volume, and decrease the overall turnaround time.

More content = Greater ranking potential = More traffic, leads, sales, etc.

Closing Thoughts On Article Writers

The need to build a consistent stream of content is demanding, time-consuming, and expensive. Modern solutions such as AI article writers provide a unique way to generate content on a large scale - therefore, this is effectively the most sustainable way to operate a content-driven business without investing ridiculous amounts of money over an extended period of time.

You can try out Article Forge and begin generating entire 1,500+ word articles today by signing up for the five-day free trial. There’s no commitment or risk. Simply sign up, and if you enjoy using AI to create content, you can then opt for one of the affordable monthly subscriptions.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out; if not, happy forging 🙂