Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I find amazing writers on Upwork. In fact, I've grown Exploding Topics to over 400,000 visitors per month, mostly from using writers from Upwork. So, you know, you might have heard that Upwork is full of trash writers, or it's a race to the bottom in terms of quality there. And to a certain extent, that's true. Upwork has like a wide range of quality level for anything, whether it's coding, video editing, writing, design, anything. But over the years of using Upwork, I've discovered a few ways that work really well for finding the cream of the crop when it comes to freelance writers on Upwork. In fact, I have a step-by-step process that I use for finding them that I'm going to share in this video. So, the first step when it comes to finding amazing writers on Upwork is the job posting itself. So, a lot of people skip over this step. They just say, you know, I need someone to write 2,000 words about whatever, and that's the job posting. The problem with that is that, first of all, you're not really attracting top talent. Most freelance writers that are really good on Upwork, they sort of have their choice when it comes to who they want to work with and what they want to write about. When they see a vague job posting like that, it makes them reluctant to apply because they're like, this person doesn't even know what they want. And they have already seen from experience that working with people like that is a pain because, you know, you send them something and then the client's not happy, but they're vague about why. You want to show that you're different. You want to show, I know exactly what I want. We have guidelines. We have standards. And that actually attracts top talent. And weeds out people who may not feel like they can just try to get away with something low quality. The other thing that I make sure to put in every job posting is a screening question. This is really important. A screening question is just something simple you put in there to show that someone actually read the job posting. Because if you've ever posted anything to a freelance job board, you know that you get so many spam applications. They're either automated or semi-automated or copy and pasted or whatever. And obviously it's fine if someone copies and pastes their experience and what they bring to the table. But you want something customized in there or just to make sure that they read it and are making something a little bit personalized for you. So the screening question I like to use is to help me sort through automated submissions, please name the CEO of whatever company. And I do that because then someone has to do like a one second Google search to see who the CEO is and then put that at the top of the posting. That way when I'm scrolling through the applications, I can automatically thumbs down anyone that didn't include that answer. So the next step is looking through the applicants and hiring a bunch of people for a test project. So a mistake that I made early on when I hired anyone from Upwork was I would hire them for the full project. They would do a bad job because most people on Upwork don't do a good job. And then I would hire a second person and they may or may not do a good job. And then I'll hire a third person. It would take forever to find someone because when you hire people on Upwork, even with everything I'm giving you in terms of strategies and techniques, one out of five are gonna work out. Like there's just the nature of the beast. This is still better than one out of 20 that you would have if you didn't have a screening questions, didn't do test projects. But the nature of it is just most people on Upwork are not gonna either do a good job, be a good fit, deliver on time, deliver at all. The test project's key because you have multiple people in parallel working and then you pick the best of the bunch as opposed to hiring one, seeing if they do a good job. If so, great. If you got lucky on the first one, great. If not, finding someone else. So the test project essentially cuts down the time it takes to find someone. So one important thing to keep in mind as you do the test project is you wanna give everyone the same assignment, the same topic, the same format. And the reason for that, it's easier to compare apples to apples among the freelance writers. You can literally have them open in different tabs and say, wow, this one's the best. It's clearly the best. Because if you give people different assignments, then it's hard to compare whether it was the writing quality, was it the topic itself? It's hard to say. And it's just kind of more fair to do it this way. In fact, when I started, I would give everyone different assignments because the idea was I need this stuff written, right? So if I hire five people for a test project and I give two people the same assignment and both are good, what do I do then? What I do now is just I say, okay, the test project's over and now here's an actual assignment. Because otherwise it's really hard to compare. And this helps bubble up the best people because you're comparing everyone equally. What I tend to do is try to make the writing assignment as small as possible. Like I literally have it, let's say it's a list post. I'll do the intro and the first two items on the list. And the reason for that is simple. You know when you read something within the first 50 words, whether it's gonna be a good fit. Is there a lot of filler? Does it seem copy and pasted? Does it seem AI generated? Does it seem generic? If so, you know early on. You don't need 2000 words to make the determination. You can determine that pretty much right away. So what I like to do is do this test project that's the smallest unit that I can. So depends on the format of the content. Obviously, if it's an ebook, it can be the first two pages. If it's a guide, it can be the intro and maybe the first two sections. If it's a list post, it can be the intro and the first two items on the list. Whatever. The point is that you want the smallest unit because you don't need anything more than that. Because you get responses back quickly. You get to review people's work as fast as possible. And also it's cheap because you wanna pay people for these test projects. Another thing that if you wanna attract top talent, you gotta pay them for their time. And I think it's totally reasonable to do so. So usually I say in your application, tell me how much you charge for the full post and this first test project. And then the first milestone that I set up in Upwork when I hire five people or so is the intro and the first whatever, a hundred words, depending on what it is. And then I find the best person from that list and then work with them on the rest of the piece. And a lot of times at that point, there'll be more work to do to refine it. But the point is you found someone that has potential that you can work with. So once you've found that person, it's onto the next step, which is to nail the first piece of content. So the first piece of content is always gonna take a little bit longer because that person's just getting used to your guidelines. And even if you do have editorial guidelines like I do, there's just always nuances, edge cases, things that just don't come up in the editorial guideline process. In fact, I once wrote a guest post for a big site and they sent me this like literally 45 page PDF of all the editorial guidelines, including like when to use hyphens and when to use this. And I was just like, I'm not gonna do that. So I turned them down. It's the same thing with a freelance writer. You should have some guidelines, but if you overwhelm them with the guidelines, they can't focus on actually producing good stuff, which is the goal in the first place. So I send them some guidelines, which are very basic. Here's kind of a writing style we're looking for. Use a lot of references, use a lot of statistics and make sure everything's super up to date because we're right about trends, right? So that's really the gist of it. After that, it's up to the writer and then working with that person, which leads us to our next step. Once you hire that person, besides the guidelines, you wanna give them templates. This is really the secret sauce of how we've been able to grow Exploding Topics to over 400,000 visitors per month is sticking to content templates. And this is what I did with Backlinko. So with Backlinko, I didn't just find a topic and I was like, hmm, maybe I should make this kind of a list post, but maybe partially a guide. I had templates just ready to go. And if you look at the Backlinko site, everything fit a template. It was either a guide, an expanded list post, a case study. The whole site is pretty much like six templates spun up into different variations and different topics. And I've done the same thing in Exploding Topics. And it's doubly important if you're working with a freelance writer because you don't just wanna leave them to their own devices and just say, here's a topic, just nail it. Otherwise, it's really hard for them because they have to write something great and they have to figure out the best format. Instead, we just give them a template. Good example. One of our templates that's been the most successful for us are different startups in different categories. So FinTech startups, education startups, SaaS startups. And we have a format that we use and send it to the freelance writer and here's the format. That way they just have to plug in the blanks. It's a lot easier for them and faster to produce. And then once you find someone that's really good at that template, you just keep assigning that template over and over and over again and they're gonna get better at it over time. Otherwise, you're reinventing the wheel with every topic which just makes no sense for anybody. And that's really been the secret. So once you find a great freelance writer, the key is to send them the templates and to get on a cadence of delivery. So once I find someone that's good, you basically want, usually once a week or once every 10 day delivery of a piece of content. That way you can plan out your editorial calendar. And I say, here's a topic, here's a template and can you deliver once per week? And usually that's no problem for them. And from there, it's just a matter of scaling that up. So to give you an example, Exploring Topics, when we started, we published once every two weeks. So two times a month. Then we did once a week and now we do four to five times a week. And it's not that we had any secret sauce or any magic formula that helped us scale up our content. It was just doing this process multiple times. So once you go through this process once, you have one writer for one post a week. You do it again, you have two and three and so on and you can scale up as long as you can. Now, obviously, some people are gonna flake out or move on to other projects or whatever. So you'll need to replace them. But this process is so fast. You can literally get someone from just like applying to producing something really good, ready to publish in like 10 days. And then from there, it'll only be less a week or less after that. So that's really all there is to it. The secret, honestly, if I had to summarize is first of all, the job posting itself. You want to attract top talent with specifics about what you're looking for. So if you're posting reviews, you wanna put tech reviews. Say we want writers that are gonna write tech reviews about this product. Here are three examples that we want. The examples can be from your site or a different site and then some basic guidelines about what you're looking for. And that's gonna sort of hopefully repel people that are afraid of these specific guidelines and attract people that wanna work with clients that actually know what they want. The second step in the job posting is a screening question and then a test project. Make sure you do a test project that's the smallest unit possible and try to give them the same topic and the same piece of content to write. So the next step is to give someone a template, ideally with some guidelines associated with them. And the most important thing you could do here is just give examples. So ideally this wouldn't be like the first time you've used this template. Hopefully you've done it before at least multiple times or there's another site that's done it and you can just give them that example and say just do it like this. That speeds up the whole process and helps scale up content which I'll probably make a whole video about how to scale up content which is a little bit different than finding a great freelance writer. But at the end of the day, scaling this up is really a matter of just using this process multiple times. There's no magical formula that's gonna take you from like not producing content that's really high quality or not producing on a consistent basis to like four or five times a week. It's just finding one thing that works, a few different templates and finding people that are gonna nail those templates every single time. And that's pretty much all there is to it. So yeah, that's it for this video. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to hit subscribe so you don't miss out on other helpful videos like this one. And I'd like to hear your experience with hiring freelancers, whether it's freelance writers, freelance editors, whatever on Upwork. Have you had a great experience hiring people on Upwork? Have you had a horrible experience? Somewhere in between? Let me know in the comments.