Chris Meistre

A while ago I wrote this blog post about writing articles for your website.  While this method might work if you have one or two websites that you’re trying to promote, you can quickly get frustrated with this process if you repeat it a number of times.

I decided to employ some freelance writers to see if I can make this whole process work better.  If I could find an affordable way to get someone to write articles for me, I would consider this a win!

After having done a lot of work on RentACoder I thought of trying their service first.  Even though it’s a predominantly Software Development Freelance website, I have seen a number of requests being made for writing articles.

My approach would be to find 10 articles I wanted written, provide the person with the keyword phrases and in a day or two’s time get back 10 uniquely written articles, ready for me to publish under my name.  Sounds simple enough, I know.

Through a process of trail and error, I started to get the hang of what I need to do to get the person to write decent articles.

Some challenges I faced:

• I’m no English Grammar and Spelling expert, but I can now take comfort knowing that there are people that are worse at it than me.  Even though this could be overcome, it took too much time to read and reread articles to get them right.
• Timezone delays are a problem, especially if you need to provide feedback or if you need to keep “helping” the person write the articles
• You get what you pay for, so don’t take the cheapest or first bidder!

I overcome most of these challenges though, and am happy to say for a minimal amount I now have at least 2 people that can write articles for me.  Turn around time is about 2 days per 10 articles, and one of them even helps me find content for the articles.  Language errors are no longer a huge problem.  The last batch of 10 articles I received, I had to read through each of them and fix a few small errors.  A lot better than the previous 10 times rereading episodes.

I would say the whole exercise of getting to a point of getting decent articles written cost me about $100.  Worth the effort if you consider that I now have someone reliable to help me.

When I’ve look at ways to advertise a website, I normally consider how much traffic I’ll get from Google Adwords.  Let’s say I want to look at $100.  At $0.07 per click, that is about 1428 clicks to your website.  For the same $100 you could get about 30 articles written.    Depending on keyword choice and market, each article should (basing on my article stats) be able to generate 131 (4.3 clicks per article per day) clicks to your website a day.  If you look at it like that, your $100 pays for your first 11 days of 131 clicks per day, and then thereafter you get your 70 clicks per day for free.

The above is not to say that you must substitute Articles for your Google Adwords, but rather use it in conjunction with it.

If I had to spend $1000 a week on advertising, I would do this:

1.  $100 per day Google Adwords Budget ($700 for the week)

2.  50 Articles written at $200

3.  Get another freelancer at $100 for a day’s work to upload all 50 article to article directories

The result?

1.  9996 clicks to your website from Google Adwords

2.  1505 clicks to your website from the Articles, with an ongoing 1505 per week thereafter for FREE

That’s about 12,000 visits to your website for the week.  If you had a 1% success rate (i.e. 1% of the visitors buys from you) and on average you make $10 per sale, you made $200 profit ($1200 sales) for the week.  But remember, the gift of articles is a gift that keeps on giving.  The following week you don’t need to spend $200 again to write 50 more articles, and you’ll still get 1505 clicks.  So with the same traffic, and less spent on advertising, you can make $400 profit ($1200 in sales).

All the above is just speculation though, and your traffic and success will depend on a lot of extra factors.

Next step for me is to try and determine which of the Article Directory sites work the best.  In the past I’ve found that EzineArticles works the best in terms of traffic.  I’ve recently signed up to ArticleBase and GoArticles to see what the response is like.