)
CAPITALISING on the rise of the freelance economy, Adrian Cordiner and his business partners launched in January this year, Prozely, a premium copywriting marketplace with an Australian focus.
Prozely started after Cordiner and his business partners noticed that despite the presence of numerous online freelance platforms which connect businesses to writers, they experienced difficulty finding quality writers who truly understood the Australian market and wrote for Australian readers.
"The reason we started Prozely was born out of necessity. Obviously there are a number of freelance marketplaces out there, but the issue we were finding was sifting through all the different candidates that put themselves forward without any sort of quality control - so it was a bit of a buyer beware situation," he says.
"The other part of the problem was that even when we found the right writers for their industry, a lot of the written work was not geared towards an Australian context."
Australia's freelance community continues to grow from strength to strength. In fact, as global freelancing platform Upwork found in October last year, an estimated 32 per cent of Australians had performed freelance work in that year, a number which likely has risen since then.
Part of the success of the freelance economy, Cordiner believes, is the much-valued benefits it has for businesses and individuals alike.
"For business, the number one reason is cost. From a big business perspective, freelancing allows big businesses to handle overflow. Bringing on resources as and when needed without being necessarily committed to them from a long term perspective - so there is a lot of flexibility in that regard," he says.
For freelancers, he believes one of the biggest drawcards is flexibility despite the downsides such as a lack of job security.
"For many people, that element of flexibility is very attractive and that is whether you're planning to go travelling and you want a job that allows you to do that, whether you're studying and working part-time and you want to supplement that or whether you have kids and you want to stay home with them - whatever it might be, the key is flexibility."
When it comes to tackling the issue of a lack of job security, Cordiner says that as the world changes, he is finding that a lot of people are not necessarily looking for job security.
"I read somewhere that a freelancer, who was giving a speech, was questioned about job security. His response was, the reality is, job security as it used to be in my parents' generation doesn't exist anymore. Generally speaking, there is no such thing as a job for life," he says.
"His point being, I have multiple employers as a freelancer, you have one - if that one employer leaves, you have nothing. If one of mine leave, I still have eight others that can pick up the slack."
Prozely's writers are hand-vetted to preserve the quality of the writing with prices charged for content based on the experience level of the writer. Cordiner says that the briefs for content which businesses submit to Prozely have been very diverse in nature.
"It is pretty board, everything from invitations to events for gallery openings for example, all the way up to research white papers, in-depth e-books and blog posts which are pretty common."
Despite being a relatively new service, Cordiner says the feedback to date has been very positive although they have experienced comments regarding pricing from companies looking for content.
"Because people have, for a long time, viewed content as a commodity, they have the perception that you should pay one cent per word and that is the price of copywriting so they don't know why they are being charged more."
"However, people are starting to realise that this is not the case. You truly pay for what you get."
)
)
)
)
)
