I’m in my fourth year of Internet marketing, and I am still struck by the importance of content on the eventual success of any Internet business. If any adage relating to this relatively new field is both tested and accurate, it is this: Content is King!
Anyone who has done much article writing for distribution for traffic or SEO purposes will recognize that it is not a simple task. Good writers have a important 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 0. 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 0. 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: , 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 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.
I genuinely hope that some of you will learn from the mistakes that my acquaintance and I made. However, I suspect you’ll have to learn the hard way just like the rest of us.
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