Article writing is increasingly popular as a way of marketing an online business. As part of your online business management strategy it's useful to have some sort of article writing strategy.
Unfortunately as the article writing methodology has grown, so to have the problems. Cheap article writers are one such problem...
Benefits of Outsourcing Your Writing
Article writing is great marketing for your website or blog, but it can be time consuming. So it's not surprising that it's one candidate for outsourcing. Writers are easy to find online. You can either go to a website with virtual employees and freelancers for hire (e.g. oDesk, Warrior Forum, Fiverr), or you can outsource via an article writing service.
I'll admit to having tried my hand at outsourcing. I used The Content Authority's article writing service to create articles for my own websites. The main reasons why I hire writers are:
- To write articles that I can't be bothered to write. This is normally because they're related to subjects which are pretty dull, or I think I have written everything I know about a particular topic.
- To write articles for foreign markets. The internet is a global marketplace if you have a website. But if you want to expand your offerings into a particular country then it's often a good idea to hire a local writer who will know the terminology expected in that country or region.
Outsourcing article writing can be profitable. More articles on your site draw more visitors in, and if your site is monetized properly then that should result in more income.
Problems With Cheap Article Writers
When you hire an article writer it's often a good idea to hire them through a reputable article writing service. Be sure to seek testimonials from other satisfied customers. Make sure the testimonials are genuine as well!
I've done a fair bit of outsourcing, especially as I want to expand my online businesses into countries such as India. I'm generally pleased with the articles I have received. They have been well researched, and make for interesting reading. There are minimal grammatical or spelling errors. I have no problems publishing the articles to my own sites. But then I'm paying around $15 for an article.
I would love to cut the price I pay for an article. That would lead to a slightly better return on investment. I've no doubt that many other website owners are seduced by the adverts for low cost articles. I've even seen article writing services advertised for as little as $1. To me that sounds crazy! Is a $1 article too cheap?
I've bought lower quality articles in the past and to be honest I'm not impressed. Sure they get search engine traffic and you can use them for backlinks and posting to article directories. But if you're attaching your brand to such poor quality writing then this isn't always wise. Trust is important on the Internet. I read recently that a shopping site with spelling errors dramatically increased its sales when simple typo's were corrected. Cheap articles are often full of spelling mistakes, as well as poor grammar. Even worse in my opinion is that often the cheap articles are just total nonsense.
Another major problem with article writers is that sometimes they will just copy existing articles. This can get you into copyright and duplicate content issues should this happen. Article spinning also happens (where an article is turned into many different copies by substituting words for synonyms).