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Finding a content writer is easy. Finding a good one…not so much.
The problem isn't supply. There are hundreds of thousands of people calling themselves content writers right now, and they range from career professionals who've spent a decade in one industry to people who just discovered they can get paid per word.
The challenge is knowing how to tell them apart before you've handed over money and waited three weeks for something you can't publish.
Ultimately, you’re not paying for black words on a white page, are you? You want results. And if a writer doesn’t deliver results (value), then those words aren’t worth very much.
This guide is for marketing managers, founders, and content leads who are tired of the vague advice. You'll get real pricing numbers, a framework for vetting niche expertise, and a clear picture of how to really hire a content writer.
A content writer creates educational, informational, or search-optimized content:
The goal is to attract, inform, or nurture an audience over time. Content writers tend to have marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and answer engine optimization (AEO) experience.
And if they don’t, well they’re more of an english or creative writer, and that’s probably not what you’re looking for from a content writer.
A copywriter writes to convert. Landing pages, ads, sales emails, product descriptions — anything where the primary job is to get the reader to take action right now.
The lines blur constantly, and plenty of writers do both well. But if you're looking for someone to run your blog and build organic traffic, you want a content writer. If you need a homepage rewrite or a product launch email sequence, you want a copywriter.
Conflating the two is how you end up with a blog post that reads like a sales pitch or a landing page that answers every question except the one that closes the deal.
Content writer as a job category is about as specific as "doctor." There are a lot of flavors. Here's a quick lay of the land before we get into the details:
Generalists can cover almost any topic with enough research time. They're fine for consumer brands, general business content, or high-volume programs where consistency matters more than depth. They're typically more affordable and easier to find at scale.
Still, research time costs money. A generalist writing about Kubernetes, DMARC authentication, or developer security tooling needs 3–4x the ramp time of someone who already lives in that world.
And the output may still not pass the smell test with a technical audience.
Specialists bring genuine domain expertise in a specific industry or topic area. A B2B SaaS content writer who's spent years covering developer tools, cybersecurity, or email infrastructure already knows the terminology, the buyer landscape, and the competitive context.
They produce technically accurate content faster, and it reads differently. Practitioners notice.
If your audience is technical or your content needs to demonstrate real product knowledge, a specialist is worth the premium.
These writers focus on search-optimized content:
Some are generalists who've learned SEO. The best ones are specialists who also know SEO.
A specialist in your niche who also understands SEO is rare and commands top rates. If you find one, hold onto them.
Technical writers produce documentation, API references, user guides, and process docs. If you need a blog post explaining how your API works for a developer audience, you might want a technical content writer who can translate complex concepts for business readers.
If you need the API docs themselves, well, that's a different skill set entirely.
It depends. You knew it was coming, but it’s just like trying to predict the cost of a visit to the dentist office…you really just never know. Still, it helps to have some good ballpark numbers, and these are as close as you get to the truth.
A few things the table won't tell you:
It’s hard to know what good writing looks like when you’re not a writer. After all, if that was the case, you’d probably just do it yourself (right?). Impressive websites and portfolios help, and published samples, too, but you can dig a little deeper to build confidence in your hire.
Published clips from recognizable outlets look impressive. They're also mostly meaningless without context. A good editor can make a mediocre writer's work shine. What you want to evaluate is their subject matter comprehension.
Look at the specificity of their samples. Do they cite specific tools, vendors, or data points? Are the claims accurate? Does the content go beyond what you'd get from a 10-minute Google search? Could a practitioner in the space spot errors?
If you're hiring for a technical niche, read their samples with your own domain knowledge active. You'll know in the first three paragraphs whether this person understands the topic or just learned enough to sound like they do.
The best test of baseline writing ability is the emails they send before any work starts. A discovery call follow-up, their response to your brief, a clarifying question they fire back — that's unedited writing from the source.
If it's vague, full of generic phrases, or hard to follow, that's the floor you're working with. The portfolio has been through editing. The emails haven't.
Yes, that’s perhaps a bit too harsh, but if they can't bother to put a comma in the write places in their emails, writing might not be their thing.
Good writers ask questions. They want to understand your audience, your angle, the competitors you want to reference (or avoid), your target keyword, and your internal linking needs.
The quality of their questions tells you a lot about how they'll approach the actual work.
When you're looking to hire an SEO content writer, check whether their samples are built around a clear keyword focus, whether the heading structure reflects search intent, and whether they think about things like meta descriptions, content briefs, and internal link opportunities without being asked.
Writers who understand SEO mention it naturally. It's part of how they think about a piece.
When you ask for samples, ask for the results. If they’re a proper SEO content writer, they’ll have the analytics to back it up.
Maybe. Probably, to some degree. And your detective skills are going to leave you more confused than satisfied trying to figure it out.
Before you go down that rabbit hole, ask yourself why it matters to you. Are you worried the writer is being lazy? That the writing will suck? That it'll be plagiarized? Those are three very different problems with three very different solutions, and only one of them is really about AI.
A mathematician who uses a calculator, Excel, or pen and paper to get to the right answer still got to the right answer. The means don't invalidate the result.
The same logic applies here.
If a writer uses AI tools as part of their process and delivers something that's well-researched, accurately fact-checked, genuinely useful, and sounds like a human being wrote it, does the workflow that got them there matter to you?
Focus on what you can evaluate:
Those things you can measure. The workflow you can't, not reliably. AI detectors are notoriously unreliable. Professors can't tell. Google can't tell. Readers often can't tell, and studies have shown they sometimes prefer AI-assisted writing when they don't know what they're reading anyways.
Yes, there are bigger ethical conversations happening around AI and content right now. Worth following. But if your immediate goal is finding someone to write great content and build organic traffic to your website, chasing proof of AI usage is a distraction from the only question that matters: is the work good?
Judge the output. Everything else is noise right now.
Now that you know what to look for in a content writer, let’s go find them. The internet is a wild place, and quality varies depending on the source. You know this already though, and that’s why you probably didn’t go shopping on Craigslist for a writer.
The source matters. Here’s where I recommend looking:
Don't hire anyone for a retainer based on a portfolio review. Run a paid test assignment first.
A good test should be:
That last one matters as much as draft quality. How a writer responds to feedback tells you everything about what the ongoing relationship will look like. A writer who pushes back thoughtfully and incorporates notes quickly is a long-term asset. One who gets defensive or submits unchanged drafts is going to drain your energy every single cycle.
A single paid test typically costs $150–$500 depending on the writer's rate. For the clarity it gives you before committing an ongoing budget, it's the highest-ROI spend in the hiring process.
TLDR:
I've spent nearly a decade writing for companies like Twilio, DigitalOcean, LaunchDarkly, Valimail, Fit Small Business, and Webflow — 1,000+ articles across developer tools, cybersecurity, email infrastructure, and B2B SaaS.
If that sounds like the niche you're trying to fill, holler at me. I'd love to learn more about what you're building.
