If you have ever paid below $15 for a 500 word article, pay attention. I conducted a case study on good content. My goal: get as much traffic to my website as possible with only three articles. This website is brand new, and has never had content put on it. I started this study one week ago from today, and am now presenting the results. First off, I'd like to say I spent probably around 10 hours altogether on creating the content for these three articles. This includes the research, writing, layout implementation, and revising. I am now proud to provide you with the following graph of the following week's statistics: Monday (106 Visits)- First day, I released my first article to the public. Tuesday (161 Visits)- Stumbled/Digged/Placed article on Wikipedia. Wednesday (205 Visits)- Released second article, and dugg/SU/Wikipedia submitted it. Thursday (617 Visits)- Did more marketing. Friday (1,247 Visits)- Worked on layout/ad placement. Saturday (2,161 Visits)- Setup my final third article, and marketed it. Sunday (1,505 Visits)- More optimization/marketing. Monday(696 Visits at HALF DAY- estimated 1,200 visits)- No interaction with website at all. Total: over 6,000 unique visitors. As you can tell from the graph, I've gotten quite a few visits. Refer to the diagram below for a surprising success. Over 100 visits came from Google within a week of the content being up. How is that possible? How did I avoid the sandbox? Wikipedia. And to get listed on Wikipedia, you must have good content. From the week's case study, I've made around $15 from about the middle of the week until now. Now I ask everyone who has bought a 500 word article for $15 or less: how long will it take you to make that money back? Obviously, I'm trying to stress here that buying cheap content will get you nowhere, while getting great content will be more expensive, but overall worth it. It takes money to make money. Don't be scared to take a risk.
Congrats Zac! My partner in a recent project sent me over some stats earlier today that tell a similar story. I wrote an article (on pregnancy and conception), and he put in on our site last Monday. He found one or two related links back to it and left it alone. (No other optimization, no Wikipedia, no Stumble or Digg, etc...) In seven days, we had 902 views through Google with 85% spending 4+ minutes on that page of the site (The site has thousands of pages.) Bottom line? Crap content might get people to your site with clever SEO (or black hat SEO), but it most likely won't make them stay. (This might be good in a few rare cases, but usually not.)
Excellent! Keep it up, sounds like you're doing great. Very impressive considering you didn't use bookmarking or any other type of popular marketing tools. What really surprised me was the Google traffic. I was previously under the impression that getting traffic like that so soon was near impossible for new sites like mine/yours. Hopefully this can influence a few people to start shelling out more money for quality . Because I'm pretty we both got enough traffic in a week to equal a $10 article's traffic in a year
LOL - Of course, I didn't actually make anything off that particular article since the site isn't fully monetized (yet.) But, I like to take a long view - this is an authority site, and it will be worth considerably more than AdSense could ever generate when it is complete. (Gosh, I sound so mysterious! LOL)
Great post. Thanks for sharing the results of your experiment zac. It proves once again the importance of quality content ;-)
Zac, you're going to piss someone off sooner or later. I won't offer results, but I have an article I wrote about 2-3 years ago (gave it out for free). To this day it still brings in traffic and gets added to new sites. I know that cheap content can make money, but the power of solid content via the proper channels blows it out of the water. Bottom line: I just like saying bottom line.
I think I mentioned this before, but not sure. Punctuation goes inside the quotes. Example: Right: Notice that each wire is simply "rolled over." Wrong: Notice that each wire is simply "rolled over".
Ahh, yes you have. Is this a matter of preference? MS Word doesn't highlight this punctual error. PS, as an update, I got on the frontpage of Digg . An easy $50 in my pocket right there!
I couldn't agree more... $15 dollars is a small fee to pay for 500 words of decently written content. We've paid people slightly more, but this is based upon the quality of their work.
MS Word isn't even in the ballpark of catching issues. It does a so-so job, but it's not professional level by any stretch. Don't rely on it.
Zac thanks for this great information... I have never paid over $10 for an article... but definitely wont be afraid of doing it anymore.
He's very right - you cannot rely on MS Word to catch all of your spelling and/or grammatical issues, Zac. He's also correct about it not being a matter of personal preference regarding punctuation within the quotation marks. Now you know!
Jesus, it's pretty unbelievable. Congrats, Zac. Thanks for taking in one point for the 'content-is-king' team. Now if only people looking for writers had lots of money and willing to spend it on writers like us then everybody would be happy. I might try this experiment too.