Does this sound familiar? You have a newsletter that needs to go out in a few days, but you just cant come up with a good article to write. You have a serious case of writers block. Or, you know you should be adding more content to your site on a regular basis to keep the search engines (and of course your visitors) happy, but you just cant find the time to sit down and write articles every week. Theres an easy solution to both problems. Hire a ghostwriter to write the articles for you.

Basically, a ghostwriter is someone that writes articles for you that you get to claim as your own and publish under your own name. No one other than yourself and the ghostwriter has to know that you didnt write the article yourself. Once you pay for the article, you hold all rights to it and can publish it wherever and however you see fit.

Now lets talk about the hard part. How do you find a good ghostwriter? You can start by posting a small project on elance or guru.com. Anyone interested in writing for you can bid on the project and you will get to choose your writer from the bidders. I mentioned posting a small project because you just dont know exactly what you are going to get until you receive the finished articles. A small project in elance or guru terms would be about 15 to 20 short articles on a subject thats either common knowledge, or easily researched. You want to make it worth the bidders (to attract good writers) without having to spend too much per article.

Other great ways to find a ghostwriter is to network with others in your field, ask friends and post on message boards related to the topic you want the articles written about. Just ask if there is someone interested in writing for you. There are also quite a few freelance writers that offer ghostwriting as well. Search for ghost writing in your favorite search engine to find sites like momva.com.

Pricing for ghostwritten articles can range anywhere from $2.00 to $65 per article. Most writers will charge about $5.00 to $12.00. Keep in mind that you will pay less for shorter articles than long ones. The average article size is from 300 1200 words. Shop around, but dont shop by price along. Like anywhere else you will get what you pay for. Articles in the $2 to $6 range tend to be pretty simple and to be honest quite boring. To get any decent hourly rate, the writer has to crank out 4 5 articles per hour and it will show in the quality of the article. You can however find some great articles in the $8 to $12 price range.

When choosing a writer, start by asking for sample articles. Find a few writers whos style you like and ask them to write a few articles each. You should be able to tell who will work out and who doesnt. If you have done a good bit of writing yourself, you may want to provide the writers with some of your own articles before they start, so they can get a feel for your style and personality. Pick one or two writers to write for you on a regular basis. It may also be worth staying in touch with the runner-ups in case a writer doesnt work out, or doesnt have time for additional projects down the road.

So, will it be worth paying someone to write your articles? It sure does for me. Submitting article and adding them to your own site is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to get traffic to your site. When you add the articles written by your ghostwriter to your site, optimize them by a particular keyword, or key phrase to get more search engine traffic. Then submit the un-optimized version to the various article directories. As your article is used on other sites and in newsletter the traffic will start coming in.

How much are you paying right now to advertise on various websites and in newsletters? $25 per ad or more? For $25 you can easily get 2 to 5 quality articles from a ghostwriter. These articles can then appear in countless publications and websites over and over again. Dont forget, your resource box, with a link to your site will be included each time the article is published. Your articles may appear in larger newsletters or even print papers and magazines that you could never afford to place an ad in. If you ask me, hiring a ghostwriter and getting more articles with my resource box out there is a great investment.