Quality Article Content is Worth a Good Price
I’ve only spent about half a decade now as an increasingly successful online marketer. However, during that period–over and over–I have learned the absolute veracity of the frequently quoted cliche that content is definitely king.
Anyone who has done much article writing for syndication for traffic or SEO purposes will recognize that it is not a simple task. Good Internet writers have a special 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 business was looking for someone to help with search engine optimization by negotiating over a thousand one way links, all from ranked sites and all with keyword rich anchor text. A good plan, no doubt. Their top end of the budget for this work was (Are you ready for this?) $300! Oh yeah, they mentioned that they had tried to reach their goals before but hadn’t received good results. I wonder why…
More to the point was another company that was looking for 300 optimized five hundred word articles. This project had a more modest budget of $150. Could this explain all the sites with worthless content that give the Internet a bad name?
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 only had to learn once from my $70 mistake. While I am careful with all of my expenses, I do not try to skimp on content. If you pay the price for junk, you will receive junk in return.
I have an acquaintance to operates a number of retail sites. He says that he learned his lesson (as it seems we all must). He has found some excellent writers. He pays $50 for each 500 word article and reports that it is money well spent. I’m absolutely sure that his business is much more profitable than the company who is offering fifty cents an article or the business that is willing to pay less than fifteen cents per “quality” link.
I genuinely hope that some of you will learn from the mistakes that my friend and I made. However, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll have to learn the hard way just like the rest of us.












