In article writing, what is considered a cheap service?

I have been following a lot of arguments lately about cheap services hijacking work from quality speakers. A lot of the native writers have complained that this has led them to lower their prices in order to get work.

As a marketer I think its supply/demand dynamics. If there is a demand for cheap services, then providers will supply that. I don;t believe that its the other way round, or is it?

Why not let's do a price survey here as well. What do you consider to be really cheap, dirt cheap, and disgustingly low priced services?

Ears to the ground!

 

Well for starters I believe that anything below $.01 per word is dirt cheap and will probably lead you to bad content. If someone is looking for quality then you must pay for it. This is true in other aspects of life and it is true in freelance writing and hiring writers.

 

So you reckon $1/words is pretty low and anything below this harms everyone ( ofcourse except the buyers who don;t mind crap content if they save a few cents)

 

I tend to believe that if you're willing to pay someone less than it costs for them to make a living wage, you're being pretty cheap. Even the best writers, if pushed and they knew their topic, probably couldn't do better than 3 or 4 articles an hour. If they don't know the topic they're definitely not going to hit that. If you want quality and between 400 and 500 words, you don't want a writer writing more than 2 articles at best per hour. At a penny a word, that's $8 per hour; at 2 cents, you've moved up to $16.

But that's if no one has to do any research, which doesn't happen even if you know the topic. Throw in research and that living wage just went down again. I'll use myself as an example. I write pretty fast once I have enough material to learn from. Still, if I'm writing 5 articles on something I don't know, it's going to take me probably an hour or two to find enough information to write something good. Then at least another 2 hours to write those articles, possibly 3. Suddenly that $16 an hour for 2 cents has gone down to $10 or $12 an hour, depending on length.

Add to that the fact that, for the people who purchase bad content, most of them end up having to alter or rewrite part of the content they received because of bad grammar or sentences that don't make sense. With someone who's good, you might not like the delivery, style, or the point of view sometimes, but you will always have to acknowledge that the writing was well done.

To me, writing is an art; if it wasn't, everyone would be doing it. Artists deserve to be paid if they can prove they know how to write; yes, everyone should at least show what they can do in some fashion. If a writer has the opportunity to make at least $20 an hour for their services, I tend to think that's fair; that's $40,000 a year if they can consistently find that kind of work. But since they can't, they may charge more per client since each client's needs are going to be different, so that they can make a nice living at it.

This may be way more than you were expecting to see.

 

I think that .01 cent per word is really good to start off with. If you are with a client and both of you get along then later the client should increase it to keep the worker happy. I think under pay is $2 dollars for 500-600 words (even $2.50 for 500 word articles is not enough!) and I have noticed that going on lately.

When you make your worker happy, chances are they will want to leave everyone else and stay with you only but when you underpay them, they will look for ways to get out.

 

To sum it all up - You get what you pay for

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

That's an interesting statement. If we work out per hour wages, a $10-$12/hour might not be enough for an American writer but its more than sufficient for an Asian writer of equivalent writing skills.

So, are we still gonna be surprised to find people offering cheap services and produce fairly well written articles. Cheap can't be always poor-quality.

The 'you get what you pay for' theory fails on the basis of that wage-calculation presented by 'the writer'.
My tuppence.

 

It's impossible for you to get any really accurate feedback here in any industry "survey." You're talking to an audience where the bulk fit into one very specific niche -- cheap content writers. $.02 per word is "high" for many of them (which is a joke in most writing circles -- hell ten times that much would still be a joke to many). Unless you can get a representative response across the board, any feedback you get in this particular forum is useless.

 

This migh be an example of "Cheap"

Want to hire article re-witers: will pay $1 per re-write. Native English Writers only
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1580619

"The articles need to be informative to the reader with 100% correct grammar and punctuation. They ABSOLUTELY MUST read like they are written by a Native English speaker...this is very important."

 

1 cent is just a trend now a days! Go by that!

 

Someone is stretching his luck a bit too far!

In reponse to JHMATTERN, I would say that all I am trying to ascertain is whether 'cheap' is always 'bad quality'?

 

^^: Yup, he is selling his service in this thread!!

 

I would say .01 is super cheap. I used to get .02 easily but now no one wants to pay that much. It's tough.

 

Well I am done with cheap work. I have a good feeling at what I am worth and started charging it and I already have a few clients that are willing to pay. So, things are looking good.

No more working for peanuts!

 

I think the real hard part to find is someone hat can write a quality article for you. And then work out a price from there.

 

In that case, thread closed. It's a topic that's been discussed numerous times already. Please search older threads instead of starting what are essentially duplicate threads to discuss the same things.