The bane of every internet marketer is producing enough good quality articles to feed the Google machine and result in an effective content marketing effort. The truth of the matter is that it is just not easy for most of us to write all that content, no matter how much we want to or how convinced we are at the start that we can actually do it.. as they say – the road to hell is paved with good intentions!
Sure anyone can throw together 4 or 5 articles for a new site but how many can keep up the momentum and churn out 50 or 100 articles and keep on updating it to turn that little microniche site that nobody ever visits, into an authority powerhouse that brings in more traffic and money than you can shake a stick at? The answer to that is “very few”.
The Auto Way or the Writer Way
So what can you do when you have a great idea for a site, you’ve done your keyword research and you’re sure it will make loads of money if you can just produce enough quality content to keep it going long enough to take off? Fortunately for every problem, there is a solution. In fact more than one, depending on how you want to do it. One method is to use automation tools to rewrite articles acquired from various sources (PLR for example). Once you have such an article, you run it through the rewriter and then edit the the returned article to fix any grammar errors (no automation tool is perfect) and when you’re happy you upload to your site – job done. However this method does rely on rewriting existing content which, while it has its place and should be part of every internet marketers toolkit, is not ideal if you plan on producing a quality authority site for long term income.
Outsourcing
The other method, one which is suitable for your authority sites if done right, is to outsource to a real human writer or in fact multiple writers. There are many places you can find writers, such as oDesk or even Fiverr but frankly the best place is one which is designed specifically for writers – iWriter. The entire system there is optimized for writers and those of us, probably including you, who are looking to hire writers and it is disarmingly simple to use – the only real danger is you may find yourself hiring more and more writers and getting far too many articles written!
Hiring writers is not without risk in other places, however with iwriter you can actually reject an article if it does not meet your specifications – there are no questions asked, no arguing, just click a button and it is gone and then your article job is sent back out to the network of writers for another go. This raises an important point – you do not want to be rejecting every article, so how exactly do you make sure to get a good article? It is critically important to approach this the right way because if you fail to specify exactly what you need, the writers will have to guess and will very likely return something which is not up to the standards you expected or may even be totally wrong in terms of subject matter.
But no need to worry – we’ve been there before and can tell you how you can get good content written with minimum fuss. You have to be very clear about what you want – you also need to be aware that there are different levels of writer: Basic, Premium and Elite. A Basic article goes out to all writers, including those with low ratings and also costs much less – a 500 word article can be had for just $3! But there’s a much higher chance of getting back poor quality, clearly spun articles. A Premium article will only go out to writers with more than 4 stars and a 500 word article will cost you $5.50 – having more than 4 stars doesn’t guarantee you will get good quality back though, you could still get back some borderline gibberish. If you’re really keen you can order an Elite article which will set you back $10 for 500 words and will only be sent to writers with a rating of 4.6 or above. Of course you are not limited to 500 word articles, you can have 150 words or 2000 words, whatever you prefer.
In fact you don’t have to stop at getting short (or even quite long) articles written – you can go all out and get full-on Kindle ebooks written for you which you could market through Amazon like a ‘proper’ author or on all the many ebook sites out there. Or you could use such ebooks as your signup incentives for your mailing lists – when you can offer a good quality, unique product (ebook) to your site visitors, the chances of getting them to subscribe goes way up.
The Right Way to Hire a Writer
To ensure you get a decent article, you should use specifications similar to the following, but of course adapted to your own requirements..
First of all make it clear that you will reject any article which does not meet your specifications – put such a warning (in your own words) at the top of the specs to make sure the writer will see it. This helps you feel less guilty if you do have to reject one since you clearly warned them of that possibility in advance.
Secondly, warn them that you will not accept content which is auto-generated.. anything that looks dodgy is probably auto-generated so you must reject that. Note though that it could still be created automatically but then manually edited to make it look like it was all written manually – there’s not much you can do in such a case and as long as it is unique, fully readable, grammatically correct, in native level english and ultimately makes sense, then it doesn’t really matter.
Thirdly, warn them that you wont accept content which is copied – iwriter runs everything through copyscape for you so it should be unique but still it is worth doing a manual check before accepting an article, just for some extra reassurance. If it turns out to be very similar to an existing article then reject it fast.
Next you should give some specifications about the structure and content of the article – for example tell them you want 4 paragraphs or 10 paragraphs (depending on article length of course) and even how many sentences you want in each. Doing this helps to ensure you get something which looks substantial and has a side-effect of potentially getting you more words than you paid for.
Specify the number of times the keyword should appear (an upper limit to prevent keyword stuffing), tell them to include sub-titles, explain the tone they should use (you can select friendly or professional already in the form but you may want to explain further). It can also help to provide some links to sources they can use to get a better understanding of what the article should be about, particularly if it is an obscure or complicated subject that they may otherwise never have heard of or have no expertise in.
It is also worth saying that you will give them a good rating if they do a good job – and make sure that you do! It helps your reputation as well as theirs which makes it easier for you to hire writers in future. Also consider that when you reject an article it affects your stats on iwriter – everyone can see the percentage of articles you have rejected and nobody wants to waste time writing for someone that ends up rejecting 90%! If you’ve done your part of the job properly (defined the task clearly) then you will be much less likely to have to reject articles, which means you have a low percentage and writers will be more keen to work for you.
What Next?
When you’ve found a writer that does a good job – make sure to add that person to your favourites list! This makes it easy to rehire the same person for future jobs – not only do you get a writer who is familiar with your requirements, but they also get paid 5% more for the job while it still costs you exactly the same, so it’s a win-win situation.
As with the old saying – garbage in, garbage out – if you explain clearly what you want and have realistic expectations (you probably wont get someone with a PhD in astrophysics writing your articles), then you can really get decent quality content out of the system and in a pretty much unlimited supply since you can hire multiple writers in parallel. Using the services of iWriter, there is now nothing stopping you from building that massive authority site you’ve been procrastinating over for so long – get it out there, fill it with great content with almost no effort on your part (besides keyword research) and start raking in the money!
What are you waiting for? Hire some writers now!!
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