A Well Written Article Is Worth Far More Than a Cup of Gourmet Coffee

I’ve lived less than five years now as an increasingly successful Internet marketer. However, in that time–over and over–I have learned the absolute veracity of the often quoted cliche that content is definitely king, no matter what the form of that content.

Anyone who has done much article writing for distribution for traffic or SEO purposes will know that it is not a simple task (otherwise why would so many be trying to buy good content?). Good web writers possess a valuable skill set.

I happened to stumble across a free lance marketplace last evening. I don’t even remember how my browser ended up there. I was intrigued, though, so I started to look around the website at some of the projects that businesses had posted. I was appalled. (I won’t tell you the site, but I will say that it is not one of the two or three such venues that are most frequently mentioned.)

One company posted a request for 300 keyword optimized articles of 500 words each. Their budget for the project was $150. I’m not math major, but I didn’t have to use my calculator to figure out that the per article payment would have been fifty cents an article. I thought that it had to be a misprint until I found another request for someone to handle a SEO link building efforts. They wanted 1100 one way, quality links from pages with page rank for the princely sum of $300. The proposal said that they had hired others for this job previously, but they had been unsuccessful in making any progress. What a surprise!

I suppose we all have to make our own mistakes. I ordered ten articles when I was new to this business. They were all to be written to my key phrase specifications. The price for this package: $70, a mere seven dollars an article. I felt as if I was getting a great deal, and I did wonder how they could do that much work for so little money. I found out when the articles were returned, on time as promised. Except for the key phrases, the articles were virtually identical. They weren’t similar enough to have been the results of spinning, but it was clear that the writer had not taken any time to research. I wasted a couple hours trying to rewrite them, correct the many errors and salvage something from my investment. I finally just gave up and deleted them all.

Think of it this way: Our content, whether it is published on our own sites or distributed to other sites with links leading back to us, reflects on our business. If we have shoddy content, our customers are going to rightly wonder about our dedication to detail. We must be wise in our content syndication efforts.

I wasted $70 for 10 articles and then invested a lot of time trying to rework those, albeit unsuccessfully. I would have been much better off using that money and time pay a good writer to produce two articles. My time could have been spent spinning those two into twenty or so variations for submission to article directories and distribution to other sites.

A well known Internet marketer whom I know owns a number of online stores. He told me that he started out paying ten dollars per article, soon moved to twenty and now pays his free lance writers, with whom he has a continuing relationship, fifty dollars for a 500 word article. He says it is the best money he spends.

Try to profit from my prior mistakes. If, instead, you have to learn by making your own errors, I hope you only throw away seventy dollars as I did. There is an advantage to being a quick learner.