Commission Your Content Marketing Services
Select the service that best aligns with what your business or your brand currently needs to view complete details.
Content Creation:
Articles, Whitepapers, Websites, Case Studies, and Emails
First and foremost, I am a writer — and an exceptional one, at that.
That’s not arrogance. I have the data to prove that my approach to content creation moves the needle and creates business opportunities for less than traditional advertising campaigns, when done consistently and with an eye toward long-term returns.
If you have content that you absolutely must have perform for you and you can’t risk an inferior product, then commission it from me.
I prefer to price per project, rather than hourly. (After all, you’re paying not just for my time, but for my expertise!)
Expect to receive shorter projects (articles, case studies, emails) in about 2 weeks, post-commission. Longer projects, such as whitepapers and websites, will take at least 4 weeks, possibly as long as 8 weeks or even longer, depending on the complexity of the project.
All prices below are guidance, not final, and are subject to change based on availability, complexity, scope, and interest.
- Articles starting at $350 each
- 1,000 – 1,500 words
- Value-first focus: Fully researched and quoted
- Engaging and clickable headlines
- Interlinking with already existing topics with natural and compelling calls-to-action
- Optimized for the keyword of your choice
- Properly formatted with any backend category / tag specifications and impactful metadata (including special search structure)
- Whitepapers (writing only) starting at $3,000 each
- Value-first focus: Fully researched and quoted, with connections back to your business’s services or products
- Landing page copy and suggested design focus — can work with designer of your choice to marry intent to presentation
- A guide on how to repurpose into articles, webinars, and email drip campaigns, as well as suggested use in sales enablement
- Possible media outreach list for distribution
- Websites priced on a per-page basis, to be determined after consult
- Case Studies starting at $1,000 each, inclusive of interview with provided client
- Narrative, storytelling-first approach to highlight your previous client’s successes with your product or service to guide them
- Covers challenge, risks without your solution, previous solutions, problem-to-product associations, and final outcomes
- Study-specific email for prospecting and sales enablement
- Fully recorded interview (audio only) and transcription
- Text-based email templates starting at $350 each or $1,000 for a drip campaign
- Complete copy, from subject line to preview to body to text-only formatting
- Compelling, clickable, non-spammy subject lines
- Clear, easy insertion of quick customization for account-based sales tactics
- Optional variations depending on customer pain point and value proposition
- Suggested send times and cadence
- Relevant and simple calls-to-action to encourage responses, sign-ups, and sales
For website-based projects and whitepapers, I require a short bio as the author with a link back to my website or LinkedIn profile. For ghostwriting without a do-follow link back or author credit, expect a 20% additional charge.
Rush pieces — that is, turnaround time with less than a week — should expect an additional 50% charge added to their proposal.
Content Audit:
Figure Out What You Have
Who Needs This: Businesses or brands that have already begun creating content, or have otherwise inherited a ton of material that you’d like to use or repurpose but aren’t sure how.
What It Is: A content audit assesses and catalogs your current ecosystem of content. Audits show how content is performing, and offers ideas and tasks to increase its desired performance.
What You’ll Get: Deliverables include:
- Master Content Catalog containing:
- Type
- Category & Tag
- Title
- URL or file location
- Traffic (Total & Average Daily)
- Realized content term rankings w/average position
- Content Matrices
- Funnel Matrix: Shows which of your current content pieces appeal to which parts of your buyer’s journey, highlighting the gaps you’ll need to fill with future content development.
- Persona Skill Matrix: Shows the general competency level of each of your current content pieces matched up with your current ideal buyer, highlighting opportunities for expansion and development.
- Suggested Content Updates, Adjustments, and Augmentations to increase performance.
How Long This Takes: Highly dependent upon the site. It took me about 80-120 hours working through James Crawford Law’s website of original content that had hundreds of blog posts. Considering that “content” covers everything from sales collateral to email newsletters to videos to podcasts to blogs, a comprehensive content audit can be, well, exhausting and require a lot of manpower to do properly.
Without seeing exactly what I’m working with to start, estimate about 4-6 weeks from initial deposit to final deliverables.
How Much It Costs: Audits start at $2,000 for an estimated 100 pieces or less, considering the level of analysis and granular recommendations. If commissioning several services at once, then I can lower this, considering the time savings.
Content Process:
Establish How, When, and Who
Who Needs This: Any business or brand looking to start their content program from the ground up, or otherwise scale up using outside freelancers.
What It Is: A content process basically drives your entire content marketing program. It’s more than just word-vomit on a new post in your WordPress site. With a content process, you’ll be able to know when, how, and who every part of your content marketing campaign runs at any given point in time – no matter how big your team gets or how many outside agencies or freelancers you hire.
(For reference, with my personal editorial calendars, I typically default to working a month in advance. A month publication cadence allows some breathing room in case of fires while still being relevant and timely.)
What You’ll Get: Deliverables include:
- Editorial calendars – yes, plural! – you can use again and again every month, just filled in with your specific topics.
- Development calendar: In an average month, it outlines what you can expect, when, from initial drafting through feedback to formatting and scheduling. Your freelancers will know what’s expected when, and your management will know what’s in the pipeline for the next month.
- Publication calendar: In an average month, what “major” content pieces go live, where, at what times.
- Distribution calendar: In an average month, what social media, syndication, and off-shoot content pieces go live, where, at what times.
- Editorial flow and project management on platform of your choice. (I’ve done Trello, Hubspot, and proprietary systems – I’m sure I can figure out whatever you want me to set up for you.)
- Written guide to distribute to all members of your content creation team, in-house or external, for reference.
- Optional live training for you and your current team members, once a final system has been approved.
How Long This Takes: It depends on how many cats you have to herd and how many specific platforms or systems you need me to work in. If it’s a system I know already, then it’ll be shorter. If I’m learning something new, then it’ll take longer.
Most of my time will be spent extracting contextualized information to ensure that final recommended process isn’t just an obscure “best practice,” but a sustainable and tailored solution to fit your unique goals and budget.
Estimate 3-4 weeks’ worth of time from initial deposit to final deliverables.
How Much It Costs: Starting at $1,500, with possibility of increasing due to scope and decreasing if commissioning several services at once.
Custom Template Suite:
Quickly Create at Scale
Who Needs This: Any business or brand looking to start their content program from the ground up, or otherwise scale up using outside freelancers.
What It Is: These are all the comprehensive templates that I use for a wide variety of content pieces, customized to fit your specific business goals and client needs. Ideally, these documents offer you a “paint by numbers” approach to quality, custom content. Fill in your portion of the outline, hand off to a (competent) freelancer, and receive ready-to-format content that’s already aligned to your business goals and needs.
What You’ll Get: Deliverables include:
- Article templates
- The “complete” internal template: Contains pre-writing and research; actual draft; metadata; images; structured data; backend formatting and cataloging; and social media posts for content piece.
- The “freelancer first” external template: Contains need-to-know research and actual draft, as well as social media posts and metadata if you’d like to ask your freelancers to complete those, too.
- SEO structured data templates – ditch the plugins that’re slowing down your site!
- Social media text post templates with the latest best times and structures for maximum reach per platforms requested.
- Case study templates
- Interview template: Contains the baseline questions that each case study must answer to qualify as a “case study.” (Hint: You need number results, not just fluffy judgments.)
- One-pager outline: The template used to create the customer-facing flyer-format case study.
- Longform guide templates
- Basic outline: Walks your creator through the anatomy of a long-form written content piece, based on our conversations as to what you want and what you’ve done previously.
- Distribution and Deconstruction guide: There’s basically two ways to create and distribute longform content. You can basically bundle a bunch of smaller and similar themed pieces together into one convenient download – think of a cupcake-cake. Or, you can break it apart into smaller articles, infographics, and social posts – more like a traditional three-layer cake cut into manageable slices.
Depending on your editorial process, either can work well; I’ll show you how to plan for both.
How Long This Takes: Since I’m adapting a system I know well to suit your company, it goes by faster than other projects – particularly if I’m already working on other projects for you. Estimate about 2 weeks from initial deposit to final deliverables.
How Much It Costs: Starting at $500, with possibility of increasing due to scope and decreasing if commissioning several services at once.
Content Ideation:
Align Your Plan With Your Process
Who Needs This: The business or brand that just wants to focus on execution, not thinking up new ideas – or has been burned by previous SEO experts who only focused on traffic but not on end conversions.
What It Is: Basically, I’ll figure out what you should be creating content about for the next six months. All you have to do is assign it to freelancers to create per your content process.
While I certainly use resources such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, Exploding Topics, Google Trends, Meltwater, and more to figure out what’s popular, you’re mostly paying for my human judgement to contextualize those tech-generated lists to identify the real content plays you should be making.
Anyone can get you a list of relevant keywords; I give you a list of keywords that potential clients are searching for that will make you stand above your competition.
What You’ll Get: Deliverables include:
- Master Content Topic List including:
- Primary keyword topic or phrase, with its relation back to a primary content topic or pillar identified in your Content Audit or Content Process
- Competitive evaluation, incorporating both machine difficulty grades and a scan of your competition quality for the same topic.
- Monthly traffic estimates for total searches
- Suggested Content format, with possible off-shoots / spin-offs per your Content Process.
- Special attention lists of unique opportunities for your brand or business:
- Advertising opportunities, flagged by a lack of content quality in top results, topic position in user journey, amount of traffic, and no / few current ads.
- Heavyweight content opportunities, flagged by rising interest and traffic, lack of content quality in top results, topic relation to brand “authority,” and ease of creation.
How Long This Takes: Not overly long, all things considered. I’ve been doing this long enough to be able to piece this together relatively quickly. The key will be doing so in a way that’s digestible for you and your team to implement immediately, which can take longer than simply printing out a list! Estimate 3-4 weeks from initial deposit to final deliverables.
How Much It Costs: Starting at $1,500, with possibility of increasing due to scope (more original topics per week and / or more complicated topics will increase the time needed to complete) and decreasing if commissioning several services at once.
“Off the Ground” Starter Plan
Everything you need to get your content program up and running for at least the next 6 months!
Includes Content Audit (if needed), Content Process, Template Package, and Content Ideation.
Plan for 6-8 weeks from initial deposit to total deliverables, depending on size of the project. I can combine many of the individual aspects into one to save time.
Starting at $5,000
“Fuel the Machine” Content Plan
Think of this package as an oil change for your content program.
To keep your content marketing initiatives running and aligned with your current business goals, you need to assess how your campaigns ran, tweak them for future performance, and figure out where you’re going for the next few production cycles. Consequently, I recommend redoing this every six months or so to stay on track.
Includes Content Audit and Content Ideation.
Plan for 3-4 weeks from initial deposit to total deliverables, depending on size of the project, for the first time we do this together. For every time thereafter, plan for about 2-3 weeks, since I already laid the groundwork for future updates.
Starting at $3,500; $2,500 thereafter if commissioned within 6 months of the last audit.