Lets run a little thought experiment here. Lets assume I own a comparitively established website say lifehack.org (No, I dont own that site). I have been running for quite some time, I have lots of return visitors and I have lots of quality content to entice my new visitors with. In this case, I cannot afford to have cheap content. Now, assume that I run some obscure site say maxmartin.com (No, I dont own that site either). I have just started up, I have hardly any visitors and very little content. Since, I have other projects running, I need to buy my content. I also have a limited budget for this project as I cannot be sure if it will take off or flop. If I buy the good (read expensive) content, I will get a lot less than if I buy cheap. In this case, I cannot afford to have good content. An established site can post stuff once in a while and still keep their readers happy, however if you are a startup, you will have keep giving them content or they will not return. Even good content will not have them come back to you as easily as from a established site. As most of us fall in the second category, people buy the cheap content more than the good ones.
That is heavily flawed. I get an enormous amount of return traffic on 6 articles only. I think I'm up to around 150,000 uniques now and it hasn't even been a month yet.
Great story, I've learnt alot from your example. If you don't mind can I ask you a couple of questions: 1. Did you do any optimisation on your articles? i.e. pepper it with keywords etc. 2. How are you doing on the SERPs? 3. Have you had any duplicate content issues? Really it shows you get what you pay for keep it up! D_D
1. None whatsoever. 2. I am average around 20 search engine hits a day, but it varies. I have a total of over 600 for a little under a month. 3. What do you mean? I had some duplicate content issues when I switched all of my extensions from HTML to PHP, and Google was late in picking up the changes. Other than that, no.
Thanks for the response. I just mean by duplicate as in has anyone tried to copy your articles etc. Its an inspiration to see such a new site grow in 1 month. I'm new at publishing on the web so I needed a few pointers. sincerely D_D
Oh, I don't think anyone has copied my content. And if they have, I don't mind. It isn't like they will rank higher than me, or at all for that matter. I did have an odd request for permission for a webmaster to translate one of my articles into spanish. But he gave me credit for the article, so I let him go for it.
There is an ad link unit and two leader boards on every article page. Perhaps they are blended too well?
For an example of this just go to ezinearticles.com. You will find some authors with great content and then you will find others with a ton of crappy articles that are either the worst articles you will ever see or blatant copies of blog posts from places like topix.net and here.
I would like to ask how much time do you devote to your site? Also, I dont support using trash or just copying someone elses articles, I support inexpensive content.
If I may pipe in, I think it would be better to launch the other site (maxmartin.com) after you have gathered enough useful content. It's just a thought. I think it's better than buying crappy content and hope that people would pick up on it later on. Or in other words, an investment of solid and well-written content before the launch is better than launching it immediately and filling it with useless posts (or at least badly-written ones). In the long run, the former strategy will work better than the latter. But that's just my opinion.
Alright- final update guys. It has now been exactly one month. I still only have around 6 or 7 articles. I have had about 160,000 total uniques, and have made just under $150 this month. Enjoy the stats, this is my last update
If you can spend 2-3 hours per article, I would consider that you have sufficient time, atleast you can spare the minimum required time for your website. My point is for the people who cannot spare that time. Nice earnings, by the way. Lets look at it from an expense point of view, zac439 earned 150 bucks from 6 articles, if he buys them at $15 per articles, he spent 90 bucks, so his profit is 60 bucks. Now, most people are budget limited as well as time limited. eg. I have 30 mins a week for this project and a budget of $50. If I buy at 15 I get 3 articles, If i buy at 5 I get 10 articles. With 10 articls, I can hope for better results than I can with 3. The question of waiting to build up content dosent arise because, time and money both are limited. Note, I support inexpenive content not trash. I still expect reasonable quality.
If you don't have time or money, perhaps you shouldn't be in the online business. You need at least one of those to make it anywhere. Show me your own study where buying cheap content can rival my one-month startup statistics and I'll reconsider. Until then, I still think being cheap on anything in life will get you less desirable results.
Great post. Thanks for sharing the results of your experiment zac. It proves once again the importance of quality content
Time and money being limited is not about me, it a general observation. Most people are running multiple projects at the same time and cannot spare the time and good amount of money I plan to run my own experiment with both cheap(approx $3-5/article) and expensive ($15-20/article) content as soon as my end-sem exams are over. I'll get back to you with the results. Also, I think you feel that I am attacking you and trying to downplay your achievement. I am doing neither, just offering a different viewpoint. In fact, you could say I even agree to your point somewhat, I just prefer not to ignore the cheap stuff just in case your might find a diamond in the coal.