Difficult Content Writer Interview Preparation Guide

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It is part of my job as a copywriter to help define and/or express your brand in a way that your audience will remember. This question is not just to go on your "about page", it's about identifying your top selling points.

If a writer opens up with this question, without any others, keep looking!
We need to know what needs to be done within your budget.
With that being said, this is an important question that any freelancer will ask… but you need to pay attention to the context of how project budget is discussed.
Never give a freelancer full control over your budget limitations, because they will probably max you out. Instead, ask for an hourly or fixed rate proposal based on project details.
To be perfectly honest, I ask this question as soon as possible to eliminate the cheap bastards that want to pay less than minimum wage for my services. If nothing else, this question will save us both time and energy.

Many web content writers are also copywriters. However, not all copywriters write web content. Web content writers specialize in writing to the very specific format of the web medium, which is unlike the marketing and copy writing formats for broadcast or print mediums.

Once you complete our online contact form, we forward you the names, resumes, and hourly rates of web writers who match your needs. This usually takes anywhere from one hour to a couple days depending upon the size and sophistication of your project and requirements. You will then have the opportunity to interview or speak with the web content writer(s) of your choosing by phone to discuss your content writing project and their qualifications. Once you choose the writer you wish to work with, we'll send you a standard sub-contract agreement. As soon as you've signed and returned the agreement, you are free to begin your project.

SEO writing has to be informative and interesting to the visitors. It should also subscribe to certain norms that make it favorable for indexing by search engine crawlers. It is important that the writing is not artificial or contrived and stuffed with key words which do not flow with the text. SEO Content Copy writing specialists keep the overall theme of the website and the particular page in mind and maintain a balance between the two. Good copy is the highway to high SERP's.

Good SEO Copy writing raises the rank of the site in the search engine results as it complies with the algorithms that make it attractive to crawlers.

SEO Content writing is a specialized art and its techniques differ from copy writing used for other media like print, billboard, TV etc. The contents have to be planned and structured with certain requirements in mind so that major search engines can find and list the pages of the website.

Unless the assignment is on-going or on-site, we recommend that you don't limit your selection to a local web content writer. The web writer best qualified for your project or with the best rate may live in another state. Technology and the global business community make it extremely easy for most of our clients and writers to live in different states.

If your business or industry is highly technical then yes, you should consider a web writer with experience related to your field. If your business in not technical, then you should hire the web writer that best fits your project and has business-to-business or business-to-consumer experience, depending upon your needs.

No, you pay WAI and we pay the web content writer. Once you choose a writer and sign our agreement, WAI sub-contracts the writer to you. WAI will invoice you for the fees and/or hours. As soon as we receive payment from you, we pay the writer minus our fee.

The hourly rate for a web content writer is generally between $50-$75 with some specialized writers charging as much as $100 or more. A WAI web writer will review your project with you, determine the scope of work necessary, and present you with an estimate on cost usually determined by the hours the project will require. Some web content writers will work for a flat fee.

Quite simply, there is no other company quite like WAI. We are the freelance and web content writing specialists. We've been in this business for over twelve years. Each web content writer is pre-screened to make sure the writer meets our exacting standards -- talented, experienced, and committed to delivering your project on time and within budget.

There are many ways to ask this question, but the point is to identify your goals. It is important to me, personally, that I only work on projects that I am qualified for. If I am not confident in my abilities to achieve your goals, I'll help you find somebody who is better suited for the job.
On the other hand, if your writer doesn't ask this question… they obviously don't care about your goals.

Knowing your audience (core market/ target demographics) is important for so many reasons. To name one, it helps define the best tone, language, and readability to use in your content. A quality content writer should know when to use- or avoid- technical lingo.

We can't all be experts in everything, so it's important to ask questions that will help us understand what you do. Even if I do know what your product/service is, it still helps to hear your own description of its purpose.

This is one of several questions I ask that are part of a SWOT Analysis, and it helps define your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Working with different clients often means having to change not only the topic of your work, but even the tone and style. This is where a very good writer is going to be your goal, and the research about the topic can be learned.

This is a great opportunity for the candidate to talk about Google+ and the importance of Google+. This network is only going to get more important as Google begins to alter SERPs based on connections and shares, and this is something a writer should be aware of when it comes time to get involved with authorship and social sharing.

There are tons and tons of different tools that a writer can use. Mentioning any sort of social tools for promotion (Buffer, Social-bro, etc.) is a great way to show that he/she understands the industry. Any talk of using analytics and analyzing CTR is also a great (and fairly advanced) answer. This is one of those questions that you'll have a good feeling about right when it is answered.

This is a tough question to answer, but most good candidates will explain that the target audience is typically small business marketing departments. This of course depends on the type of company that the candidate wrote for in the past (which might very well be slightly different than your current audience).

I typically go around to different blogs to find a topic, and then I take that topic and find a bunch of articles regarding that topic. I try to take bits and pieces of each, and the majority of the time a new angle or opinion will come to me through all of the research.

For this job, it's important to be happy working alone and setting your own daily goals.

Creating content for marketing purposes requires a collaborative effort. You want a content marketing writer who is open to receiving feedback - both positive and negative - on their work, and who is willing and able to incorporate that feedback into their future writing efforts. A writer who gets defensive or isn't open to suggestions will just cause you headaches.

The answer here should jive with the sort of working relationship your marketing team wants to have with its content marketing writer. If you want to be the ones coming up with ideas, then you need a writer who is happy to take assignments as they come. If you don't have the time or inclination to come up with ideas, then you need a writer who is happy to take on that task. When there is a mismatch here, it will cause frustration on both ends of the working relationship.

The prospective writer's answer to this question will help you figure out how she thinks and whether her thinking will work well with your industry, your company and the type of content you want to create.