The most essential tips to manage your freelance copywriters
It is really stressful to control your workers in the office, but let’s face it…It’s getting even harder to manage your freelance employees. The most popular freelance distance-based workers today are, of course, the writers. Today, we call them copywriters, but they can be everything else you can think off: from a genius, but lazy technical writer to an old maid, who prefers to live with her cats and remain in the same job position (proof-reader) for 20 years, because nothing else, but correcting others for their mistakes, makes her that happy.
In other words, managing your freelance copywriters can be tough, especially if they are all individual with their own weak points or bad habits in a combo with the distance you have between each other. But there is, of course, a way or even greater: many ways to establish a decent and effective control on them. Here are the most essential tips to manage your copywriters that can help you with this chore…
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Get fine candidates the first place
If you are certain for someone to be quite disorganized and not disciplined at all, why taking it on a distance-based job anyway? It might be a great talent, but if this copywriter does not show any of it, you just cannot give your money away for something old you have written with his or her name below…
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Organize yourself first
If you don’t settle the task to your freelance copywriters the right away, don’t expect them to perform it well. As a matter of fact, a bad boss, who assigns his tasks badly is even a worse boss, when his workers work from home. It is easier to communicate and overcome the misunderstandings, when you are in the office than when you are stuck at home with a task that does not make any sense and no one actually answers your Skype questions for the last five days. Things get nasty if your deadline is in 1 day…
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Use the right tools for control
GPS time tracking is a great alternative for all kinds of distanced workers. We love it for freelance copywriters mostly because it is common to have some tourism and adventure lovers among them. Ok, your proof reader has assured you that she can work even from a peak of a mountain, but are you really that sure that she can edit a text of 5 pages after one bottle of rum in the wilderness…
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Be the fair boss
It’s not the good or the kind boss the perfect boss, but the fair boss. Because a decent worker –and after all, we assume we work with decent workers – cannot argue about being right, when reported timesheets online say they haven’t written the required amount of papers for the last one month. What we are trying to say is that you need to prove when blaming someone for being lazy. And you also need to punish, when it is certain that your freelance copywriter deserves it. Large bonus systems are fine, but in a combo with closing your eyes for incomplete tasks they just don’t work.
