I think most business owners who operate only in the physical world would be astonished to know how much written material is required for an online business enterprise.  Using the Internet for commercial purposes requires an immense amount of content.  Whether we rely heavily on video or the written word, every utterance or sentence must be carefully crafted.

Your site is often the first contact a prospect has with your company.  While web design and your actual product or service are essential, the quality of the expression of your words will have an enormous impact upon the lingering impressions that your prospects have of your company.  Therefore, you must be certain that the writers who are doing the work are the best that you are able to afford.  This is no place to look for small savings in the budget.

Many companies choose to meet their writing needs in house.  However, many other companies are not well suited to the task of managing a staff of competent writers, who write carefully and research diligently.  Many businesses, instead, contract their writing through free lance authors or by using the experience of an Internet article writing service.  Some will go to guru.com, for example, or another website that facilitates the hiring of contract workers.

Out-sourcing writing can be a wise investment for most firms.  Before you settle on a writing service or individual author, however, take time to be sure that they have a reasonable understanding of the special requirements of online businesses.  Here are a few things to check:

1)  Any writer should be properly trained, of course.  Equally important is that the author is naturally fluent in the language of your target market.  For example, I grew up primarily in the United States.  I speak a couple of other languages, however, I would hire a British writer to at least edit my work if I were writing exclusively for a target market in the U.K.  While we write (and speak) the same language, the idioms, slang and many casual expressions are very different.

2)  No writer can be expected to be an expert in every subject.  However, you need to determine whether the writer who is going to write for you has the ability to quickly learn what is necessary about the subject to be able to write about that topic in an engaging manner.

3)  They must be able to write conversationally for the web.  Writing for most Internet venues is very different from writing for an academic journal or composing a report for school.

4)  They must undertand the purposes of the article.  If it will be published on your website, the article may have a very different purpose than if it is to be distributed for article marketing purposes.  The former deals with a reader who has already found your site, while the latter is designed to attract visitors to your site.

5)  They must recognize the role articles play in your essential search engine optimization efforts.  Some free lancers will recognize that need because of repeated exposure to writing for the web.  Others will have no idea what the term even means.

All of these concerns are more important to consider than whether an article costs you , or even 0.  Ten weak articles do not have the impact on your long term profits that one very good piece of prose will.