Where Should I Get My Web Content? The Secrets of a Web Writer

Clearly it is quite a difficult task finding content for your website. After all, you need something to fill all that blank space, but where to get it? And how much should it cost? There are numerous places that you can get content from, many of them are simply traps for the lazy, greedy and unwary.

Writing Companies: You may see advertisements for 'writing companies' or 'content providers' about the place. Should you use them? To help you make that decision, here's what 'I have a team of experienced and quality writers' actually means: 'I have enslaved some people from India/Azerbaijan/The Outer Reaches of the Cosmos, who may know how to use a spell check, but will probably just copy and paste together other work they found on Google'. You might be able to tell that I am not such a fan of these places. Generally they are exploiting the desperate, the poor, and at best all you can hope for is a so-so sort of deal.

Article Packages: This is where a writer writes, say, a hundred articles on dogs, and sells the rights to the package over and over again. You can pick these up for cheap, because they're pretty much worth nothing. You are guaranteed duplicate content, so in terms of SEO potential you might as well sculpt your money into pretty origami shapes and burn it on the front lawn. Blame the buyers for this though. This type of writing has emerged from the demand of idiotic site owners who want something for next to nothing. Hurrah to the writers who are actually pulling this one off, I don't have much sympathy for those who are pure slaves to their own greed.

Article Directories: Refer to the comments about Article Packages on this one. It's pretty much the same thing. Think about it for a second, an article directory is merely a pit for articles that weren't sold elsewhere. Here I am referring to the places which make entire articles available to all and sundry. There are variants in which you can purchase articles based on a small sample of the article, and they may be better. Personally it's never made financial sense for me to write articles for nothing and then hope they sell somewhere, but other writers may find this to be a somewhat lucrative approach. Somehow I doubt it.

And finally, there is always the option of hiring a freelance writer directly. There are plenty of them out there, talented, qualified, professional people who will supply you with original and captivating content. Just don't expect them to do it for nothing.

Here is the truth about writers:

A decent writer doesn't need to work for a company. A decent writer can make plenty of money writing their own damn content, or writing for sites that pay a living wage. Think about it, why would any good writer be writing for .01 cent per word when they could be writing content for their own sites and be making all that lovely advertising money for themselves? It makes no sense, and one must assume that web masters who think a writer should work for these sorts of amounts view writers as being largely disposable word monkeys. This attitude often prevails even when the web 'master', tries to write his or her own content and finds that it is much more difficult and time consuming than they previously imagined.

Of course, not all freelancers are good ones, but it's really not that hard to weed them out. A good freelancer has clips, references, and experience to back them up. Remember, this is freelance work on the Internet, which is pretty much the Wild West of the writing business. You find a good writer the same way you'd find a good gun slinger. They're alive. They have links you can visit, clips to show you, and impressive stories about the time they wrastled a search engine spider into submission in some dark valley. They're good at what they do, and they expect to be paid well for it.