Should You Be Worried About Indian Outsourcing?
I was doing some light reading over the weekend, when I came upon a Reddit post that suggested that there was no point in learning how to write copy because many people suggest soon enough copywriting will be outsourced to India.
I posted a tweet immediately upon reading it:
What?
I have had a few days to reflect on the idea that Indian outsourcers are going to attempt to steal the entire copywriting industry from underneath our noses, and the following article is my eloquent thoughts on the topic.
The Condensed Version
There is no need to worry whatsoever about Indian freelancers stealing the copyright industry. To elaborate a little more, there is no particular worry about any country’s inhabitants stealing the copywriting industry. Realistically, there is not really anything to worry about concerning outsourcing or job stealing in the copywriting industry. I’ll tell you why.
Why You Don’t Have To Worry: Low Quality, Low Pay
There are some people who believe that every single industry is going to be overtaken by foreigners willing to work for one dollar an hour. On the horizon, there will also be people who are going to claim that robots are going to come and steal our copywriting jobs as well.
You can already get content spinners which are essentially robots which can produce thousands upon thousands of words content. You can already outsource to India or the Philippines for content mill style work.
To anyone afraid of copywriting work going the way of the dodo, I suggest you actually try and do that.
What you will find is that spun content sticks out from a million miles away, and if you pay one dollar a day to a freelance writer from a Third World country, you will get writing that reflects that.
I don’t believe anybody who has actually outsourced to a foreign language writer would agree that those writers are going to steal jobs from advertising professionals.
The Nature Of Copywriting
you could probably get a freelancer to rewrite an article from Wikipedia for not very much money. They would probably do a halfway decent job if you pick wisely. But writing copy is a far more complicated process than simply rewriting.
To be good at copywriting, what you need is to understand psychology, selling and persuasion. Furthermore, understanding of those things is not enough; you need to be able to write in a way which persuade people to buy will change their opinion.
This is not something that can be done with a ten hour English as a second language course. It requires a great command of the language, which most foreign speakers don’t have. Not that I am disparaging them in any way, because I can’t convince anyone of anything in a foreign language. But the point still remains that writing is quite a high-level use of language.
It’s also not something that can be done on the cheap. It requires hours of research to be able to point out the benefits of something and put them in a way that is easily digestible to an audience which might have no prior interest in the thing.
Copywriting is also something that is best done by somebody shares the culture with the reader. There is a massive difference between writing copy for an American audience and writing copy for a British audience, even though we speak the same language. Different cultural expectations and practices mean different things go over differently. Compound that with a writer who doesn’t  speak English as native tongue, and you really have a complex mess of different factors which lead to bad copy.
Even If…
Sam H points out on Twitter that the benefits of writing copy far exceed just working as a copywriter. Even if all the copywriters were made bankrupt tomorrow, you would have a lot of copywriters that would immediately become better at something else. Copywriting is sales, and sales is the backbone of pretty much every business transaction in every industry.
Sell your own things? Surely not.
So in Short…
There is absolutely nothing to worry about if you are a copywriter, and you are worried that outsourcing will kill your business. I think I’ve already written far too much on this topic, so I’ll leave it there. In short, don’t worry.
P.S. I’m trying a new method of writing with this post. It’ll probably read a bit differently to my others. Don’t worry about it.
Unless of course it’s terrible – then let me know.