Have you EVER paid below $15 for a 500 word article?

If anyone was still curious on my progress, I still only have 4 main articles up. (About to put up another) It's been about two weeks later, and I've made around $100 in Adsense.

People, the extra money you pay for content is worth it. Trust me.

 

Have you done much link building other than digg/SU/wiki?

This is where i fall down, i write all my own content for my website but i cant get th traffic to the site, any tips?

Great stats by the way

 

That's impressive, I'm not sure how you did so well.

 

unique article and its quality make he difference

 

The point of cheap articles is that even if you dont get return visitors, you make up for it by the sheer number of uniques you will get because you keep updating more than you do with the good (read expensive) content.

 

This might be true, but the time you spend updating the site is costing you money in effort that could be spent elsewhere.

There is a fine line between constantly posting new crap to get uniques, and posting a few quality articles one time that generate returns over time. Obviously there is less effort once good material is up and you've established traffic sources. Using cheap articles effectively means you have to throw them up, find traffic, throw up some more, find traffic, etc...

After awhile, your ongoing efforts eat up most of your profits. In many cases it would have been better to simply set up quality material that would begin generating its own new traffic sources (i.e. legitimate links back, etc...) rather than having to constantly work at finding new people to click away from cheap articles rather than actually reading them.

 

Well said!

And not to mention that I'm pretty sure Google can tell the difference between cheap content, and the quality kind. How many times do you find poor content on the first page of Google results?

Well, it depends on what you search for, but more often than not you'll find great resources.

It just doesn't make sense buying cheap content. You just don't get the returns you could get with quality content.

 

Actually, with Google's latest algorithm update I'm seeing more and more garbled crap on the front page. Specifically, I'm seeing it where my sites used to be...

No, I'm not bitter at all

 

These results should be posted on every site where people are willing to write for .01$. I am so tired of seeing good writers not get paid what they deserve because 1. People want good articles but don't want to pay for them and 2. Some writers aren't willing to stick to their guns and ask for a price that they are worth.

 

Great content equals massive traffic. Well done Zac

 

Too true.

What is the url of the site? I'd be very interested to read these articles.

Also, what do you charge for article writing?

 

First link in my signature!

 

Quality always pays off!

But, as you say - it takes a lot of hard work/time!

 

Yikes. That traffic generated from the articles are worth a lot more than the mere $15!

 

The case study is a great way to highlight the value of well-written content.

It looks like the interest in your experiment has overshadowed your question, though.

Who's out there buying content on the cheap? The obvious follow-up: Why?

 

It all depends on what results you are trying to achieve. I would absolutely agree that quality articles pay off over time and are well worth the effort, but if you are using article submission purely for backlinks then the articles can be of lesser quality.
I use a mix of both quality and quantity. Quality for long term results and pure traffic, and quantity for building back links and moving site pages up in the serps quickly.

 

15$ may be is perfect price for an article which can generate you even more than its price.I am a copywriter and i make only for 5$ .I think i too need to make few changes to my price.

 

Wow amazing. Thanks for the stats! Actually I purchased several softwares that can create blogs in a flick of a finger and use RSS to provide content to them. After giving it careful thought, I realized it's still best to stick with original, well-written content.

 

Excellent post!

 

Man, I've been looking for a study on this and I found it. I'm amazed that some webmasters are willing to put their good name on the line and go with sub-par writers.

I'm also shocked at how many times I've seen threads that stated :

"Good, english speak writer

Want write good article for you site.

$0.007 per word pric. send PM"

Then, people actually respond. Mind-boggling.