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The first thing is you should be precise in what you’re looking for. If you need someone to flesh out an e-book on the subject of your time in Vietnam, that is a very different project, and will attract a completely different set of resources, than a project to write, from scratch, on how to build an internal combustion engine or a set of six articles on how to get your website the top rating on Google.

As an example of the number of possibilities Elance boasts that it has “50,000” professionals available at any time. Even if this is true, and you decide to peruse Elance in your search for a great ghostwriter, how can you possibly select from among 50,000 or even 50 writers effectively?

The answer is, you can’t, really. What you can do is “qualify out” the majority of potential submissions and then develop the ability to quickly assess the rest, culling the herd down to just a few from among which you will then choose.

First, you can – and we generally recommend you do – avoid offshore resources for writing. This will reduce the bidding pool significantly on any of the project auction sites or the response rates to your classifieds or job listings.

While offshore ghostwriters offer a compelling price point, our experience is in writing you are dealing with subtleties that are both cultural and linguistic and the money saved using someone in India, Mexico, Argentina or China to write prose will be spent two or three times over fixing their work, as well as wasting time and causing frustration.

Remember we are talking about ghostwriting – not general copywriting for example for search engine optimization purposes. That sort of keyword-driven work can easily be done offshore with great results. Ghostwriting of longer pieces with personality and skill, cannot.

When you are producing “content” for a series of websites or RSS feeds or similar kinds of “word hungry” situations where the actual quality of the writing as writing is less important than length, word frequency and other factors that can be handled by almost anyone who has basic competence with written English, we encourage you to go for a cheap resource that delivers. You need volume and speed primarily, and volume and speed can be had for a song.

On the other hand, when you’re writing something more meaningful, intended to be read and reread, that you may charge money for and that will have your name and or your company’s name clearly associated with it, you want something better than just OK.

We’d say you want US, UK, Canada or similarly-based resources. You can shop regions. A typical NYC writer will generally charge more than a typical Katy, Texas writer, for obvious reasons.

You definitely want to hire experienced writers, but unfortunately, specific experience can often not be verified, either because the work was actually covered by a Nondisclosure (as a huge percentage of ghostwriting and indeed copywriting is), or for other reasons.

Also, when we say “experienced” we mean experienced at the kind of writing relationship, deadlines, and project you have – and except in a few complex scientific, tech and medical areas, specific subject matter background generally matters less than basic skills and professional writing experience. A truly talented writer can write on almost any topic effectively, if given time to do the necessary research.

In terms of qualifying, bear in mind that you can ask things of an independent contractor that you might have legal trouble with asking a potential W2 employee. You can ask detailed questions about experience and background, you can even ask how old someone is, since experience in a contractor is not the same as in an employee – and while the law is evolving on this, you are unlikely to get sued by asking a contractor who claims 25 years of experience how old he is. If he’s 28, that should tell you something, since some writers might well start professional work in their late teens, but none start at age 3!