Let's face it, writing articles takes time and effort. It's the first thing that 90% of us will outsource, and it's also one of the things that most of us will make mistakes on. There are so many cheap article writers out there offering their services for $5 or less, that it's all too tempting to assume that this is the “going rate” for articles. Many people will scoff at the thought of paying $10.
One thing I notice a lot of people doing online is trying to do business how they WANT to rather than how they SHOULD do. If there are corners to be cut, we often take those shortcuts. In this case, why pay $60 for an article when you can get 6-12 articles for that price?
I'll tell you why.
If you are putting average content up on your website, you are going to get average results. [Tweet This]
Let me tell you something about the average Internet Marketer….their average results don't look so pretty. Most of them fail. Quality is what separates the good sites from the bad, and this gap will only get bigger as time goes by.
Content Marketing Is Changing – You Get What You Pay For
A few months ago I started building yet-another-niche-site and this time I wanted to see what would happen if I outsourced as much as I could, as cheaply as I could. The logic behind this was that I wanted to be able to create a guide for people who have little time to produce their own content.
The aim was to get traffic, get some earnings, and maintain or flip the site after around 6 months. Well the 6 month mark is approaching and the site barely gets any traffic. I've built a few links, I've added a decent amount of content, and it sits there saying
“Nope, nobody is going to come”.
The content just sucks. It's not “spun” or even duplicate content. It's just really weak.
Let's have a quick look at the stats of this site:
Posts/Pages: 23 (Reasonable)
Back-links: Minimal, mostly some social shares and a few article directories.
Engagement: Very, very low.
Traffic: Even lower (<100 a month)
When a site is in its infancy, the things that Google looks at for rankings are engagement (usually via social traffic until organic traffic grows), back-links (as long as they are not spammy), content, and various other metrics.
Doing It Right – No More Cheap Article Writers
If I had been doing it right, this site would be sitting on more than 1 or 2 page 1 rankings, and would be getting thousands of visits a month by now. Doing it right would have consisted of more social sharing, which would have led to comments and engagement, and natural re-shares and so on. Instead, I loaded crappy $4 content onto the site and was almost too embarrassed to share it anyway.
Google has got a LOT better at detecting poor quality content, and is great at identifying whether or not a site is popular. Even if I had built a gazillion back-links to the site, and they were the best links in the world, Google would still know that people weren't keen on my content, and wouldn't be that interested in giving me rankings.
Moving Forward – NO MORE Cheap Article Writers
I still think there's a chance to save the site, it's not exactly done anything black-hat or been penalized, it just doesn't look that good.
Here are the steps I'm going to take:
- I'm going to load, professional, engaging content onto the site.
- I'm going to share it and build a social following.
- I'm going to encourage repeat visits, subscribers, and generally build a fanbase.
- I'm going to make this a site that actually helps people!
It's amazing how something so fundamental could slip me by, but I was trying to get success by doing the minmum work, and in the end I wasted my time and money.
If you try to save time or money with cheap, low quality outsourcing, all you'll do is WASTE time and money. [Tweet This]
I'll reveal more about the site in a later post (as well as my progress with “saving” it). For now I just want to get that bad boy doing well without everyone jumping all over the site. It's a bit shy right now.
Outsourcing Quality Content
I bet you groaned when you realized you needed to use quality content. Paying for real professional writers isn't cheap. I've been paid $60/article before, and even that is a starting price. You could pay $100/article and up for something REALLY good.
Don't be put off though. There are many companies with in-house writers that will offer their services for a lot less. I've just recently built-up a service that gets you 10 articles for $199, that's just $19.9 an article.
These are all hand-crafted, professional quality articles, brought to you with a huge discount because you're buying in bulk. You can learn more about that here.
I wish I had come up with this solution in the past, because I wouldn't have wasted money on crappy content trying to get more and more long-tail keyword rankings.
Image Credit: PhotoSteve101