Fair Price to pay Somebody to Write Unique Articles for Me?

It's an interesting question.

Here's the thing. If you're talking about articles to submit to like EZA or whatever then they're really not worth that much for a few reasons:

1. EZA is mostly used to promote other monetized sites. So the articles don't really have to be that good if you know what I mean.

2. EZA is not an authority on anything. People don't go to EZA to learn about stuff. In fact, most of the articles on EZA are skewed toward whatever product they are trying to promote/sell. No one wakes up in the morning and says "hey, I want to learn about forex/chess/painting/history/coding/dog training, I know, I think I'll go read EZA!" No. Most of the articles on EZA are BS anyway, written by internet marketers who know the secret to making $1,000 per hour on Forex, or who cured arthritis, Tourettes, and Parkinsons disease with "one simple secret!", or who will teach you to fuck supermodels even if you are ugly!!!11!!!one!

For both of these reasons, EZA articles are really not worth very much.

You can be a master of some subject area, but it's not going to matter for EZA. I'm not sure if I'm phrasing that correctly.

Here's another example. I know someone who writes fitness articles for a popular magazine. He's a respected expert in the field. He gets paid in the hundreds of dollars per article. He could pour that same knowledge into an EZA article pimping some stupid IM product, but why? It wouldn't be worth his time.

It takes 10-15 minutes tops to write an EZA article, and that's if you don't even know anything about the subject beforehand. I do them myself because no one who's an "expert" in the subject matter is going to want a reasonable rate for it, and IM articles are so shitty anyway that as long as your grammar isn't completely atrocious it will likely get accepted.

Sorry, I'm being overly verbose without contributing much additional info (which is ironic because that's how you write EZA articles anyway, lol, I crack myself up!). Here, this is a good way to put it:

In other words, if you can find someone who will do it for $2, or if you find a subject matter expert who will do it for $500, there's not going to be any difference in the amount of hits that it gets, or in the amount of traffic that it converts. Remember that you're likely selling to the 80% of people, not the 20% of people who are intelligent enough to go get their info from respected sources.

Now, there are times when it's worth hundreds of dollars to have someone write something for you, for example, if you know some master copywriter who can write excellent landing pages that convert well. But if you're just talking about articles to promote your site posted at like EZA or articlesbase or helium or articledashboard, there's not going to be much difference between a $2 writer and a $500 expert.


Addendum: in the off chance that you are talking about having someone write articles for you for some sort of expert site or something, then yes, you're probably going to have to pay more. For example, if you run a site about advances in neurological imaging technology, then having morons write $2 articles isn't going to cut it, and you're going to have to pay a lot more to get experts who know what they are talking about. But then again, if that's your subject area then you're probably not trying to sell some bullshit internet product anyway (zomg acai berry cleanse!) and you're probably operating on an entirely different level anyway.

edit - this post is brilliant and should be stickied.

Thanks for the replies guys.

mollah, for EZA my purpose would be to get the article ranked high in Google (obviously getting back links to the EZA) and possibly going down the 'link wheel' road of linking a few Web 2.0s up which then go to my website.
So can I assume a $2 article for EZA would be ok, if that's the road I was going down?

My plan was to write (or have written) unique articles for places such as GoArticles, EZA, Squiddo, Hubpages etc. and then 'spin' them for article directories, all linking back to the orignal article and my main website. Each unique article will link to 1 other Web 2.0 article.

So with this in mind, you think paying $2 an article will suffice?

muchacho said:

Thanks for the replies guys.

mollah, for EZA my purpose would be to get the article ranked high in Google (obviously getting back links to the EZA) and possibly going down the 'link wheel' road of linking a few Web 2.0s up which then go to my website.
So can I assume a $2 article for EZA would be ok, if that's the road I was going down?

My plan was to write (or have written) unique articles for places such as GoArticles, EZA, Squiddo, Hubpages etc. and then 'spin' them for article directories, all linking back to the orignal article and my main website. Each unique article will link to 1 other Web 2.0 article.

So with this in mind, you think paying $2 an article will suffice?

Click to expand...

Yeah, absolutely.

But with any writer, start with one or two pieces and then see if they're good quality or not. If they are, then order more.

If you get some crap like "[my niche] are goods and fun because of happy a times for playings with a game" or some incoherent shit then you know not to use that $2 writer anymore.

If you live close to a college town you might want to advertise there for two reasons:

1) college kids are poor and would like the extra money
2) they're all gonna be native English speakers

Great advice given by everyone here. It comes down to how desperate the person you're looking to hire is and how patient you want to be in weeding out the crap writers. I've got a writer that does my EZA stuff for $2 per article, (I supply research content and keywords) but just like with my rewriters for AC, I took the time to weed through the subpar writers first.

Another idea would be to get one really good quality article done which may cost you a little more but then you can use that to get other writers to do rewrites for you at $1 or less. As others have stated, take a very close look at the samples that are submitted and run them through copyscape or articlechecker or something as some writers submit a sample that is not theirs in the hopes of you not catching on until it is too late.

That happened to me, lucky I was smart enough to set up a different email addy to post the project because someone did 50 articles they sent me in one go and they were so bad that I couldn't get past the first sentence. And the person in question actually had the audacity to tell me that he used the Queen's English and I didn't know what that was.

Cheers for the replies.

I think what I'll do is do the manual labour myself to begin with.. probably writing unique articles for GoArticles & EZA and then spinning these for other Web 2.0s, unless I'm linking them up.

When I start getting a consistent income from this, I'll then go down the outsourcing route and pay others to do the writing for me.

One thing that would be helpful, and slightly off topic in a way, and that's a place which shows which of the Web 2.0s such as EZA, Go Articles, Squidoo etc only accept unique articles, the max words you can use, whether you can have outgoing links in the body, whether they pass Page Rank, if they are authority sites.. etc.

There doesn't appear to be a file/webpage which displays this, instead of having to go to each terms and conditions and making notes on them all.
Maybe you guys know of something like this?

It will then help to sort out from all the Web 2.0s, which are the best to use in each circumstance. For example EZA only accept unique content.

try the outsourcing websites, don't bother with trying to hire people from your area if you're in a first world country, you can get people to write much cheaper at decent quality from other parts of the world... only hire the english pro's and really good writers if its for something like an online news magazine or something where people are coming for specific content or its getting listed in google news (where it'd get a ton of views), if its just for SEO google doesnt know the difference between a mediocre writer and a good one and actually seo copy isn't really the best quality of articles from a reader's perspective and having an english degree would probably just make the guy cringe at having to spew out seo crap.

madblacker said:

try the outsourcing websites, don't bother with trying to hire people from your area if you're in a first world country, you can get people to write much cheaper at decent quality from other parts of the world... only hire the english pro's and really good writers if its for something like an online news magazine or something where people are coming for specific content or its getting listed in google news (where it'd get a ton of views), if its just for SEO google doesnt know the difference between a mediocre writer and a good one and actually seo copy isn't really the best quality of articles from a reader's perspective and having an english degree would probably just make the guy cringe at having to spew out seo crap.

Click to expand...

That's one of the funniest punchlines I've seen in a while

The problem with buying articles, is that it is a bit like buying software.

You have the low end, the $1-$5 range, and then you have the top end $500+

At the low end, you have the IMers buying. At the top end is typically print magazines and the like. It really is not worth it for most IMers to buy at the top end, if you are after adsense earnings. We just don't have the capital, and really want far better returns.

A $500 article that makes you $1 per day over 3 years still leaves you in profit. We just don't have that kind of money to tie up in one article, that we know will be copied and pasted on MFAs almost as soon as it is published.

There really does not seem to be a market for anything in between. A bit like the music industry really. The winner really takes all.

I am trying to grokk this, and think I might have a few ideas for getting $100 quality for $5.

On a related note, I challenge anyone that wants to buy articles to write a few articles themselves. Bonus points if you do it for another buyer.

Get their list of 'requirements'. Get their 'keywords'. I assure you, when you have banged out 10 articles on "wills", you will realise just how soul sapping that kind of work is.

I started with article writing as a way to make instant money. It is not sustainable. At least for me. There was a huge gulf between the effort I put into the articles, and what the market figured they were worth.

Plus, banging out a 500 thread post is much easier than banging out a similar length article for some bozzo buyer obsessed with 'keyword density'. And oh yes, he wants his articles submitted in this and that very precise format.

The rewrites are just as crap, if not worse. Most of the PLR articles that serve as originals really should never ever have been published, nevermind sold to 100s of unsuspecting buyers.

LOL. in the internet you can either write for the BOTS and spiders or you write for your readers.... thats the only 2 audience you got