A recent conversation with a client who hosts a number of websites led us to cover the inevitable changes that will take place regarding page ranking tactics, SEO techniques and the way site owners will need to reform their current grabby approach if they are to prosper in the future. The conversation stayed in the back of my mind until today. Having suffered one of those lousy nights of restless sleep, I found myself awake and ready to work by 4am this morning and decided to call it a day around lunchtime once my schedule was completed. If I finish early, I like to use the time for a little experimentation and today was to prove particularly worthwhile. I submitted two articles to a public request on Constant Content some time ago after a potential customer requested pieces on candle making. I was already aware that there was a bit of a scurry for candle articles and had already made a couple up during some earlier downtime in case I ever needed them. The customer never purchased them but I was happy enough with the content and kept them. Just in case. After lunch today, I went back to the candle pieces to see where they could be improved. I had a little play around with them, made them slightly better than they already were and decided to advertise them here on DP as 'Premium Quality' PLR articles at $10 for the pair. A lengthy sample was provided so that any potential buyers could take a good look at the standard of work. It wasn't exceptional, but it was pretty good for what it was. After all, I struggle to get all that excited about wax at the best of times. I was genuinely curious to see if the trend towards PLR content had changed at all since I was last involved in it around 7 months ago. Back then, I was in my first few weeks as a writer and thought that everybody worked for ridiculous money! In truth, I could have handed in anything at the time and it would have been accepted. Trying to be professional, I always made sure the work was of a good standard. Unsurprisingly, my advertisement here has been met with several PM's and one forum post saying my prices are too high. Let's get this right so we all understand: An 800 word piece, written twice so it could be improved, in perfect grammatical English, was considered to be 'too expensive' at $5. Having sold 300 word pieces for almost ten times that amount recently, I was forced to ask exactly why my work was deemed to be too expensive. The answer, I feel, is surprisingly simple. People really would pay less for an inferior product and at the moment, there really doesn't appear to be any of the changes myself and my client were talking about just a couple of months ago. In the UK, we find ourselves dealing with 'value' brands all the time. Our leading supermarkets now sell pretty much everything in three different varieties. We have established brand items, supermarket own-brand items and the 'value' item. The established brand name speaks for itself. When I want a tin of baked beans, I like to buy them from a company called Heinz. They are the most expensive beans on the shelf but they taste great, the sauce is wonderful and they're still affordable even though they cost a few pence more to buy. Supermarket own-brand items represent the intermediate level in the exciting world of baked beans. They're moderately priced, edible and can be enjoyable to eat. However, you still find that unless you drown them in tomato ketchup, you'd have been better off spending a few pence more on the Heinz variety. Finally, we have the 'value' baked bean. A sad, often discoloured specimen with no obvious nutritional value that lives in a sauce that can be only described as coloured water. You wouldn't eat them even if you were paid to and I can only imagine there's a pig farm somewhere with several dozen porkers mopping their brows in relief that they're not having beans-on-toast for tea tonight! Yet miraculously, 'value' beans still sell as well as the Heinz or supermarket own-brand beans. Why? Because people just don't seem to care about quality anymore. In the same way as hundreds of thousands of households in the UK will tuck into their 'value' beans without actually caring that they're absolute rubbish, hundreds of thousands of pages of web content will find themselves poured onto virtual toast for cheap, yet totally unsatisfying, consumption. I just don't get it. Today was my last venture into the world of PLR articles. They've only caused me misery in much the same way as 'value' baked beans give me terrible gas. As small and as insignificant that I am, I'm still going to be reaching for the top shelf when it comes to buying my beans. As for selling my articles, I accept that some will simply have to sit around and gather dust on that top shelf inside my hard drive before they get the price they deserve.
Nobody puts a golden saddle on a crippled old horse. Many website owners who only buy cheap content have crappy websites that do not have nor require quality. These webmasters seem to believe and practice the below 2 principles to the point of incredulity 1] Increase your income by reducing your expenses 2] Quantity over quality So they just buy lots of cheap articles (Copyscape passed nevertheless) and stuff their sites with it. It is both a problem of aspiration and fund shortage. Many website owners seem to be content with meager earnings which their poor quality websites generate, so they don't strive to better them with quality articles. Moreover their meager earnings probably don't allow them to buy high quality content (Priced highly) on a regular basis. Or maybe they feel that quality can be compensated for by quantity. Why buy one high quality 50$ article written by an expert when you can buy 10 decent quality 5$ articles for the same price?
Since PLR articles are meant for rewriting, perfect English is not a requirement. It is better to sell high-quality articles at Constant-Content or Dailyarticle.
I think this might be where my own level of confusion stems from. Is it not more beneficial to rewrite several good articles from an excellent original than to produce shoddy rewrites from a shoddy original? Either way, I'm done with playing around with them. I can see the appeal for certain markets with this type of work but my most recent experiences have indicated, yet again, that it's not somewhere I want to go myself.