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Great article Mitch! Never thought to appeal to English professors before. Great idea!
Thanks Adam. I never would have thought about it specifically if I hadn't talked to my friend originally. He really was the genesis of this idea without really knowing it.
lovin the cheap association to writers. awesome.
association to writers... oh yes!
I don't see a problem in saving money by hiring people at a rate that they are willing to work for. Also, cheap is a relative term, so someone with your kind of experience can demand higher wages, whereas I am offering people an opportunity to gain experience as a content writer and therefore demand a higher wage.
Additionally, I always trained employees and they gained more than just pay during the time they worked for me.
You get what you pay for.
this
That's funny that you are on some crusade against this without ever having seen a piece of writing from these writers.
Yeah, I'd rather have a cheap writers association to demand higher rates.
Love finding peeps from local schools. Plus, they always can use an extra few bucks.
This is a fantastic idea. If you were to tell me in high school or college that I could get $10 for writing for 30-45 minutes I would say absolutely! And please pay the writers at least $10 an hour/400 word article. :)
Exactly. I'm glad you see the point. And I am a huge proponent of paying people an appropriate wage. It guarantees happy writers that will want to work for you for quite a while.
Thanks for this post, it's a great concept. Personally though I think top quality content at a cheap level is a bit of an urban myth. I appreciate this is a great method for finding good value writers, but how long does it take to write a top quality bit of content that's going to be read, shared and linked to? Probably more than an hour! Just my opinion of course. I have a couple of friends who will disagree completely as they are content producing machines! Unfortunately I'm still getting up to speed :(. Nonetheless great post and thanks for sharing!
Sam, I have some writers who I would gladly take their content over that of a lot of professional writers at larger publications. Many of them have never had a chance to be write for larger audiences, and therefore they can't command the higher rates that these more established writers do.
It's simply a matter of where they are at this stage in life.
Good point Mitchell.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that generally, content doesn't come cheap. Whether it's your own time your inputting, or someone else's you're paying for! Agreed that some of your writers are better than some of the bigger publishers, but I'm probably better than some of the writers from the big publishers!
If your own writing is better than that of your writers. Trade time for content. Simple equation really!
I think posts like this is highlights how a lot of SEO's are going to approach content marketing, how do I scale and how can I do it cheaply. Content done right isn't cheap. The price you quoted is what I expect to pay from all those packages available on the WarriorForum. In fact, I used to, for my own affiliate sites. There were lots of people offering the same service, most using students or other's who will work for little money. $18 per hour isn't going to get you a quality writer, that needs to be made clear. You may get away with this in some verticals, but creating content just for the sake of creating content isn't worth it in most cases. Unfortunately proper content marketing isn't cheap. If you are just looking for something to fill the keyword gaps, then yeah, maybe this works. If you are looking for content as part of a wider strategy, then I wouldn't put my trust into people I am paying $18 per hour.
I also agree with the above point, I hate the association between content writers + cheap.
The idea itself is great, in terms of how you scaled it during your college years. Really impressed with that. Just not sure I agree with a load of SEO's now running around trying to employ students on the cheap to churn out content.
Kieran, I think that in many verticals you can get quality content at that price.
Let me ask you a question. When hiring a content writer, who do you hire?
You may have forgotten to contact employability departments at universities! I'm still a student at uni and that's where students get most of this kind of job offers all the time, straight in their inbox!
It's almost 2013 and I'm pretty surprised to see the content farmer approach hailed here with almost 30 votes. I hoped that Panda made more people learn.
That's why SEOs fail again and again and whine after every Google update, because they have just created another cheap, low quality, exploitative set up.
Just look at who wins in the long run. Does SEOmoz employ cheap writers? Does Search Engine Land employ cheap writers? Does Search Engine Watch employ cheap writers? That's why some SEO publications are around for a decade or longer while others are not. That applies to all industries.
I think you are missing the point of the article. No one here is advocating low quality exploitative setup. The article is looking to find QUALITY writers. It's about finding people that are skilled, training them up to make them better, managing them correctly and guiding them to produce high quality content. Notice that he had an editor? To make sure quality was assured?
If you want to help assure and streamline the quality part even more, hire quality research/content matter expert employees in India, Pakistan, middle east or Philippines and have them compile the data and outline and have the student turn it into a high quality article.
Let's address the 'cheap' part... what's cheap to you? $18? $20? $40? I venture to guess that $18 is not bad for a young college student sitting at his dorm vs. having to drive to a place of business etc.etc.. They are working on THEIR schedule and during the hours they decide.
Like I said before - think you are missing the point. This is out of the box thinking on how to achieve quality content on a less expensive basis.
I get the feeling that if I had titled the article "How To Find High Quality Writers In Your Own Backyard" you wouldn't have had an issue with this. You are put off by the word cheap. Let me point some things out to you.
"It's almost 2013 and I'm pretty surprised to see the content farmer approach hailed here with almost 30 votes. I hoped that Panda made more people learn."
This was not for building content farmer sites. This was selling content to other Internet marketers. They would then use that content as guest blog posts, as blog posts for their own sites, or as actual content for their sites.
One of our clients that used our content almost exclusively sold his site for $125k two months ago. But I imagine the person overpaid because we have cheap content right?
"That's why SEOs fail again and again and whine after every Google update, because they have just created another cheap, low quality, exploitative set up."
What is low quality about hiring college educated writers that are close to having an english degree? These people have spent 2-3 years already working on honing their craft as manipulators of the english language. Or 2-3 years studying health and medicine. Or engineering. Or law. The people I hired are plenty qualified to write about the topics they were writing about, and are skilled in their use of the english language.
What is exploitative about paying students more than they could make doing other jobs? When I say cheap, it is comparative to what I would pay other writers that produce a similar quality of work, but still higher than other alternatives. Perhaps you feel differently but that is your opinion and not a fact.
"Just look at who wins in the long run. Does SEOmoz employ cheap writers? Does Search Engine Land employ cheap writers? Does Search Engine Watch employ cheap writers? That's why some SEO publications are around for a decade or longer while others are not. That applies to all industries."
I think I already addressed this. Why does it matter if I consider it cheap but the quality is still there? Cheap is a relative term. And as for this not winning in the long run, once again, please refer to my previous example of a client that sold his site for $125k. He's still ranking, after over a year and many panda iterations, for a lot of short tail head keywords.
I appreciate your comment because it shows how closed-minded many people in the SEO industry have become. The whole point of the blog this was posted on is lean marketing. It's about finding a way to do the same or more as your competitors with less money. And that is really what the whole point of this method is.
Good day sir.
This: "I appreciate your comment because it shows how closed-minded many people in the SEO industry have become."
Shame.
FYI Search engine watch does have some really shitty misleading pieces plus they also have ads for textlinkads all over the place. So I take it you're supporting paid link networks over good/average content. Seems fair.
As for SEOmoz yes they're a great company with awesome not cheap content but seriously they made 12 million in revenue last year, demand media has a market cap of 798 million with crap content. In business terms both could work.