Buy cheap, buy twice. That was my old man’s advice on battered Ford Fiestas. But the same rule applies to content writers (hear me out).

Dan Horton at DaveN’s blog asks some questions about sourcing web content:

• Do you get what you pay for?
• How far should the content writers job go?
• Who outsources their content and who writes it in-house?
• How much is too much to pay?

Like any professional service, you get what you pay for with writers.

A good accountant recoups their yearly fees pronto. A talented lawyer knows when to tell a rival to stick their Cease-and-Desist-letter in their pipe and smoke it. A decent SEO recites the seven secrets of SEO success as a bedtime prayer.

Likewise, a talented writer knows how to:

• Produce provocative headlines (AKA Diggbait)
• Captivate readers (AKA sticky content)
• Create a strong call to action (AKA turn tyrekickers into buyers)

Hire a mediocre writer and you get passable, filler copy. Hire a talented writer, and you’ve the potential for highly linkable, solid gold content. The kind of web content that bloggers link to, bored office workers forward to their friends and Diggers pass idle judgement on.

What SEOs dub linkbait is really nothing more than ‘quality content’ + ‘creative marketing’.

PS. For a copywriting crash course, I recommend the Copywriting 101 tutorial at CopyBlogger.

(Inspired by Copyblogger’s The Mark Twain Guide to Better Blogging)

Forget 1984 or Animal Farm. George Orwell’s legacy to webmasters were his thoughts on copywriting.

Orwell died 40 years before Tim Berner-Lee got busy, but he understood the power of the written word. His most famous essay - Politics and the English Language - offers outstanding advice on how to write clean, concise and easy-to-understand copy.

That’s the kind of web content that makes users want to spend money, because they understand exactly what you are selling and why they should buy it. The very same web content that search engines lap up, because it’s genuine ‘quality content‘ that makes Matt Cutts go weak at the knees.

Ignore the word ‘politics’; Orwell’s advice applies to any topic. He diagnosed common problems with writing and offered six simple solutions:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I urge anyone writing for the web to tape these six bullet points to their monitor. Read them as a morning mantra, digest the Wikipedia precis now and print the full text to read tonight.