by Francis
(Francis, 26 May 2015)
I am a big fan of creating content with my original voice, literally, with minimal effort and time investment. I’ve already talked about how transcription can be used to speed up your efforts in creating good content considerably.
Now, I have implemented an additional step into my content creation team. I have actually hired someone to proofread my transcripts. She is a native English speaker and does a great job proofreading my transcribed recordings to give you the best reading experience.
What the editor can do
At the moment, my editor mainly takes care of correcting grammatical errors, punctuation and the misuse of words due to English being my second language. I can see her editing tasks grow by taking care of turning long, complicated sentences into short, snappy and well understandable sentences. This is something no proofreading program can do.
Where to find and hire a proofreader
I have hired my editor from my favorite outsourcing service. But actually, my main virtual assistant discovered her before on Fiverr. There, you can find many editors who are willing to proofread batches of text by certain numbers of words for only $5. In my opinion, this is of advantage in comparison to hourly paid jobs.
Why fixed-priced projects are better for proofreading
Proofreading can take time. Proofreading can be supported by software and all sorts of tools. If you hire someone who claims to be a native English speaker and pay them hourly, then it is very possible that you will exceed your budget for the proofreading task. A fixed-priced project makes sure that your budget is never exceeded. If both the provider as well as you, the employer, are happy with this agreement then all is well.
How adding an editor to my content team helps me
I have an easy time recording myself into my mobile phone for content creation. My teamwork with my transcriptionist works really well too. My main virtual assistant can take care of placing the articles in the right positions, optimizing them, illustrating them and so on. There was one missing link – proofreading and fine-tuning the transcript. That is a task that normally I would have to do.
That being the busy person I am , I often neglected doing this. So I ended up having tons of drafts of almost well written articles sitting on my desktop. There is no way to profit from the experiences I have written down and saved locally on my computer. That data has to go out and to the internet. It has to be published.
So hiring a proofreader helps me speed up this bottleneck of the content creation and also motivates me to create more content on a more regular basis. Now that I know that my recordings won’t be sitting somewhere unfinished, I’m confident that I will be able to share many more thoughts and lessons about outsourcing virtual assistants and all aspects related to that in the future.
I hope you can appreciate that as well. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments regarding hiring an editor for your own work and projects.
Leave a Reply