After a great weekend trip to Toronto, I’m back in my parent’s basement attempting to pump out as many articles as I can before my head explodes or I go insane. Writing articles for submission sites is probably one of my least favourite jobs, so my goal of writing 80 articles before the end of September seems a long way off at the moment, even though I’m off to a good start.
A few people have mentioned that article writing should be outsourced, not only to save one’s sanity but also because outsourcing allows for far more articles to be written than one person would be capable of. I think it’s a great idea, believe me. I would love to spend my time thinking of article topics and anchor text and let someone else fill in the gaps but unfortunately it’s not really in the budget at the moment.
That’s not to say I don’t already outsource, though. I currently pay writers to produce content for several sites because I’m not able to come up with the same quality of information without spending loads of time on research. At $15 for 800-1000 word articles, I think it’s a bargain, especially considering the quality of some of the submissions. Link building is important, but so is having actual content on my own sites to point the links to, so I feel like paying writers to make that content is worthwhile.
I have also outsourced the development of a custom WordPress site for $500. According to comments on the post, it’s sort of been 50/50 on whether this has been a huge waste of money or not. I’m still up in the air until I see the final product but for the amount of time I have saved in not having to wrestle with WordPress, so far so good. Getting the new site just the way I want it isn’t something I would have been able to do on my own so, once again, the outsourcing is to fill a gap in my own skills and knowledge.
Article writing, on the other hand, is something I am fully capable of doing myself, probably to a higher standard than if I were to pay someone else to do it for me. Sure, my time might be better spent elsewhere but writing articles, while annoying, is easy. It might drive me crazy if I do it for long enough but I think writing a few for myself is important so I can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and do a bit of experimentation. I think it would be silly to pay money to outsource right now since I have very little experience with this. I want to do some testing and have a good plan in place before I start paying other people to do it for me.
Curious about what outsourcing article writing would cost, I took a look over at Elance to see what people charge for article writing but it’s difficult to tell because the bids always seem to be sealed. The only information I have is that the budget for the jobs is almost always ‘Less than $500’ which tells me nothing, especially since the number of articles being asked for will vary. I did browse through completed jobs though, it looks like this service goes for around $8-12 per article which is a bit too rich for me right now.
So I am a bit fan of outsourcing but I’m not yet in a financial position to throw money at article writers. I would rather use the few outsourcing funds I have towards things I can’t easily do myself. Once I get more of a feel for article writing and get a bit more money behind me I will experiment with outsourcing but, for the moment, I am content writing them myself.
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