I came across another prospective client today who has fell foul of using a non-English native speaker to produce their website content. They need quite a lot of text re-written, that they have already paid to have produced by somebody else, somebody who did the job for a few dollars. Just take a look at this example paragraph:

XXX is an Italian fashion company with more than 30 years of experience in the fashion field.
Its history is characterised by a costant research for new value, tangible and intangible, to provide to its clients all over the world.
XXXl has been able to impose itself overall in the Italian and European scenery maintaining a constant growth since 1997.

So many of my clients have been burned like this before they came to me, but who’s fault is it? Personally I believe it is their own fault, anybody who thinks they can have somebody write good copy, whilst paying them almost nothing, is barking up the wrong tree as they say. Luckily a lot of them do move on and find a decent content creator to provide them with great copy.

I worry about those that just throw in the towel, thinking there is no point trying to find a good writer, due to the experiences they have had with bad writers in the past. This is bad for my business. Every bad writer, undertaking projects for peanuts and delivering garbage, is hurting the overall image of all freelance writers who work via the Internet.

Lastly, let’s not forget the freelance work sites, that do nothing to ensure that service providers are actually qualified and capable of doing the work they bid upon properly.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 1:40 am and is filed under Clients, Freelance, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.