Whether you are an old school copywriter or you have just started in the industry, finding the right clients can be difficult. You don't want to go around offering your services for less than they're worth and finding proper work is not always easy. So what's the best way to advertise your services? Do the ads offering "best content writer, much cheap price" really appeal to clients? Are there really people out there that are willing to pay anything at all for the content when the writer cannot get through the title of their advertisement without making a mistake? I suppose this is a question I already know the answer to, after being in the industry for about 5 years, but it still never fails to surprise me.
Of course, there are buyers of all kinds, just like there are sellers of all quality and expertise level. People who have no understanding of high quality content are prone to think that people will read any junk as long as there are enough keywords. Settling for inferior writers is a surefire way of saying "Hey, I don't understand what quality content is all about." Many such people do end up making money because they are good at other stuff like SEO, marketing or even BH... but sure enough, if you go to their websites you will not be able to live through one of their articles.
Rather than there being buyers out there who don't understand what quality copy is about, I think it's more a case of writers not understanding what their copy is actually for in the eyes of the buyer. When it comes to crappy articles, all the buyer wants is a chunk of text they can post online for free to and put a link back to their site in. They know it's crappy quality - they don't care. They just want the link. I've even seen semi-random Bayesian-type text used for some articles. These articles aren't there to gain traffic to the site - they're just a means of getting a cheap backlink that the site hopes will will help them get better search engine rankings. This is why Google made the recent Panda update: the amount of article spam got way out of hand, so Google massively devalued the importance of article links in its ranking algorithm. It's probably take a year or so for it to die down completely as the word filters through to everyone, but Panda effectively killed the spammy article farms that had sprung up. Savvy writers should already have given up on articles and be looking for gigs elsewhere.
Value and perception of value are two different things. There are people working for $5/h and people who are working for $5000/hour. The difference is in the value added. For example, if can save the client $10000, then it's normal to be paid $500/hour. On the other hand, if you are writing second tier articles that will only generate him a few unique hits per month, then it's normal to be paid $1 per article. A top copywriter like Montello asks for $15.000/letter. And he deserves it. I'm interested in coaching with him and it's $1500/month last time I've asked around. So ... stop trying to be the cheapest person around. To earn money, you must be effective and you must work hard. It's the E x E equation. Effectiveness x effort = results. If you articles are a level 1 and you put in 10 hours a day = 10. If your articles are level 5 and you put in the same hours a day this means = 50. And the 10 compared to 50 it's like $1000 per month compared to $5000. Good luck, Razvan