Don’t Abandon Quality for Savings When It Comes to Content
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I’ve only spent about half a decade now as an increasingly successful Internet marketer. However, in that time I have learned the absolute veracity of the often mentioned cliche that content truly is king.
Anyone who has done much article writing for distribution for either 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 Internet writers have a special skill set.
Last night I happened to find myself at one of those websites where free lancers can view project proposals from businesses and vice versa. It was not guru.com, but it was a site similar to that. I decided to look around just to see the sorts of things that were listed. I actually laughed out loud at some of the proposals, even though I was alone in my office. I needed to share my frustration; hence this article.
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!
Very early in my short career, I was guilty of the same thing. I once contracted for a package of ten original optimized articles for $70. I received articles that were strikingly similar to each other. They were indeed packed with my key phrases. Indeed, they were little more than keyword spam. I tried to revise them so that they would be usable, but I finally decided that I would be better off just completely starting over.
Because of the essential nature of having quality content for our own sites and for use in our syndication efforts for traffic and search engine optimization purposes, we must be very efficient in our article marketing efforts. Few things impact our reputation more than the content we put out there with links leading back to our websites.
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 benefit from my prior mistakes. If, instead, you have to learn by making your own mistakes, I hope you only throw away seventy dollars as I did. There is an advantage to being a quick learner.