You Get Back What You Invest With Article Content

I’m in my fourth year of Internet marketing, and I remain awestruck by the importance of content on the eventual success of any Internet business. If any adage relating to this relatively new field is both tested and accurate, it is this: Content is King!

There are plenty of online sources of information addressing the important necessary talents of writers of online content. Those skills are not quickly learned, nor can they be cheaply found.

I happened to stumble across a free lance marketplace last evening. I don’t even remember how my browser ended up there. I was intrigued, though, so I started to look around the website at some of the projects that businesses had posted. I was appalled. (I won’t tell you the site, but I will say that it is not one of the two or three such venues that are most frequently mentioned.)

One company posted a request for 300 keyword optimized articles of 500 words each. Their budget for the project was 0. I’m not math major, but I didn’t have to use my calculator to figure out that the per article payment would have been fifty cents an article. I thought that it had to be a misprint until I found another request for someone to handle a SEO link building efforts. They wanted 1100 one way, quality links from pages with page rank for the princely sum of 0. The proposal said that they had hired others for this job previously, but they had been unsuccessful in making any progress. What a surprise!

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 . 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 only had to learn once from my mistake. While I am careful with all of my expenses, I do not try to skimp on content. If you pay the price for junk, you will receive junk in return.

I have an acquaintance to operates a number of retail sites. He says that he learned his lesson (as it seems we all must). He has found some excellent writers. He pays for each 500 word article and reports that it is money well spent. I’m absolutely sure that his business is much more profitable than the company who is offering fifty cents an article or the business that is willing to pay less than fifteen cents per “quality” link.

Try to learn from my early mistakes. If you have to learn by making your own errors, I hope you only throw away seventy dollars as I did. There is an advantage to being a quick learner.