Will Surren – Make Money Online Monthly

I think most business owners who operate only in the physical world would be astonished to know how much written material is required for an online business venture. Using the Internet for profit purposes requires a huge amount of content. Whether we rely heavily on video or the written word, every utterance or sentence must be carefully crafted.

We can never lose sight of one simple reality; our website is often the first exposure that most prospective customers have to our company. We must make a lasting, favorable impression on our visitors with the words we choose to convey our story. It is essential that our writers meet the expectations of our prospective customers or clients.

Many companies choose to meet their writing needs in house. However, many other companies are not well suited to the task of managing a staff of competent writers, who write carefully and research diligently. Many businesses, instead, contract their writing through free lance authors or by using the experience of an Internet article writing service. Some will go to guru.com, for example, or another website that facilitates the hiring of contract workers.

Out-sourcing writing can be a sound investment for most firms. Before you accept a writing service or individual author, however, take time to be certain that they have a reasonable understanding of the unique requirements of web businesses. Here are a few things to check:

1) They should be fluent in the language of choice (that of your target market). I prefer writers who have grown up with the language rather than those who have learned it later in life, as they will be more familiar with idioms, common expressions and the idiosyncrasies of usage.

2) No writer can be expected to be an expert in every subject. However, you need to determine whether the writer who is going to write for you has the ability to quickly learn what is necessary about the subject to be able to write about that topic in an engaging manner.

3) They must be able to write conversationally for the web. Writing for most Internet venues is very different from writing for an academic journal or composing a report for school.

4) They must undertand the purposes of the article. If it will be published on your website, the article may have a very different purpose than if it is to be distributed for article marketing purposes. The former deals with a reader who has already found your site, while the latter is designed to attract visitors to your site.

5) They must recognize the role articles play in your essential search engine optimization efforts. Some free lancers will recognize that need because of repeated exposure to writing for the web. Others will have no idea what the term even means.

All of these issues are more important to consider than whether an article costs $10, $30 or even $100. Ten poor articles do not have the impact on your success that one very good piece of prose will.

I’ve only spent about half a decade now as an increasingly successful online marketer. However, during that period I have learned the truth in the frequently mentioned cliche that content is definitely king.

Anyone who has done much web article writing for syndication for traffic or SEO purposes will recognize that it is not a simple task (otherwise why would so many be trying to buy good content?). Good Internet writers possess a special and valuable skill set.

Last night I happened to find myself at one of those websites where free lancers can view project proposals from businesses and vice versa. It was not guru.com, but it was a site similar to that. I decided to look around just to see the sorts of things that were listed. I actually laughed out loud at some of the proposals, even though I was alone in my office. I needed to share my frustration; hence this article.

One business was looking for someone to help with search engine optimization by negotiating over a thousand one way links, all from ranked sites and all with keyword rich anchor text. A good plan, no doubt. Their top end of the budget for this work was (Are you ready for this?) $300! Oh yeah, they mentioned that they had tried to reach their goals before but hadn’t received good results. I wonder why…

More to the point was another company that was looking for 300 optimized five hundred word articles. This project had a more modest budget of $150. Could this explain all the sites with worthless content that give the Internet a bad name?

Very early in my short career, I was guilty of the same thing. I once contracted for a package of ten original optimized articles for $70. I received articles that were strikingly similar to each other. They were indeed packed with my key phrases. Indeed, they were little more than keyword spam. I tried to revise them so that they would be usable, but I finally decided that I would be better off just completely starting over.

Think of it this way: Our content, whether it is published on our own sites or distributed to other sites with links leading back to us, reflects on our business. If we have shoddy content, our customers are going to rightly wonder about our dedication to detail. We must be wise in our content syndication efforts.

I wasted $70 for 10 articles and then invested a lot of time trying to rework those, albeit unsuccessfully. I would have been much better off using that money and time pay a good writer to produce two articles. My time could have been spent spinning those two into twenty or so variations for submission to article directories and distribution to other sites.

A well known Internet marketer whom I know owns a number of online stores. He told me that he started out paying ten dollars per article, soon moved to twenty and now pays his free lance writers, with whom he has a continuing relationship, fifty dollars for a 500 word article. He says it is the best money he spends.

Try to profit from my previous mistakes. If you have to learn by making your own errors, I hope you only waste seventy dollars as I did. It pays to be a fast learner.