Content can be produced relatively cheaply these days. Articles are charged per word, and are priced not on the originality and value of the article as a whole, but on the uniqueness of the content. For online marketers, any content which contains a good distribution of their targeted keywords and doesn’t get flagged by the big G as ’spam’ or ‘duplicate’ is good enough.
This approach is pretty standard for content that is published on the web for free in order to generate CPC or CPS revenue for the online marketer. I’m sure many online marketers still continue to buy cheap content, monetise it with adsense ads or affiliate links, and earn peanuts for their efforts. And if you are one of those guys and already pay for low quality content, you might as well go all the way and start churning out bot generated scraper content on a massive scale.
The point is this: if you’re going to have real, unique content produced by a real writer, then make sure it’s quality and don’t just give it away for free. Don’t hire any content writer to write you generic, keyword rich articles on a topic simply because you want to post it on your content site to help it rank higher in the SEs for the purpose of generating more money from ad revenue. If your site sells an actual product and receives affiliate traffic, then SEO articles help. But otherwise, don’t publish cheap content for free.
Instead of spending $100 on 20 cheap articles written by a cheap, foreign content writer, spend $100 on one long article written by a certified professional on your topic and turn it into paid content to be added as an addition to a bigger project you may have started working on. Invest money on content not so you can drive traffic to the page you post it on for the purpose of making affiliate sales, but to create something which has a much greater perceived value and as a result is appreciated and valued much more for the simple reason that it’s paid and therefore quality as opposed to free and therefore cheap.
There is far too much ‘free’ content on the web, free content which has been written for the sole purpose of having the site it is published on ranking in the search engines and generating ad / affiliate revenue. And believe it or not, the average web user isn’t looking for generic content or even better, bot generated content. They want real content to provide them with real value. And while more and more online marketers focus on churning out as much cheap or bot generated content as possible, there will be an even greater demand for high qualiy information – which is why online publishing will continue to thrive and web users will be more than willing to pay for access to high quality information.
If the niche is good enough for you to make money from ads or affiliate links, then it’s good enough for you to start charging for the actual content. More on this later.
