When a business starts looking into website content writing rates, it's easy for them to get led astray onto websites that promise far more than they can actually deliver. Unrealistically low prices are one of the main hallmarks of these outfits.
Now, globalization and the rise of Internet marketing has caused a huge drop in outsourcing content writing prices. Ten or fifteen years ago, professional freelance article writers generally got hundreds of dollars per article. Now that number is in the tens. None the less, there is still a very real limit to how cheaply quality content can be made.
In fact, most of the outfits that offer such low content rates do so by using a number of tricks that make it so that, even at bargain-basement prices, you're still getting overcharged. What you get from cut-rate content farms is often outright worthless. All of the time, poor blog content can be harmful.
How Some Companies Offer Impossibly Low Website Content Writing Rates
There are a number of ways that these websites create content so cheaply, but few of them could be of any real benefit to your online marketing strategies.
-
Non-native English speakers: If the website is overseas, be wary. Many do not properly screen their writers or ensure they are truly fluent in English writing. Grammar and spelling issues are often a problem when buying cheap blogs. You can't risk having poor writing giving people a poor impression of you.
-
Spinning articles: Cut-rate outsourced bloggers often recycle other peoples' content by running them through “spinning” software that replaces most words with synonyms. It gets around plagiarism scanners, but without doing anything but rephrasing existing articles. Such blogs are generally clunky in construction, and are unlikely to gain readers.
-
Mass autospinning: Some pages like to offer hundreds of pages of content in only a matter of days. This bit of magic is done by taking spinning to the extreme: using a handful of core articles, and spinning them over and over so that you get hundreds of variations on the same basic thing.
-
Outright plagiarism: It still happens. To protect yourself, at a minimum, try to avoid any web content writing websites that don't make plagiarism scanning a direct part of their processes. When in doubt, there are also plenty of free or inexpensive scanners online, such as those used by teachers to police their students' writing.
Now, of course, some look at this and just don't care much. If it increases website metrics, all's fair in blogs and war, right? The thing is, it simply doesn't work. Worse, it may actually hurt your online rankings.
Google Cracks Down On Cheaters
If you let yourself get lured in by too-low website content writing rates, you risk running afoul of Google Penguin, Google's oddly-named set of new security measures implemented throughout 2012. Google is now actively cracking down on websites that only recycle content, as well as actively rewarding websites that produce original work.
So the moral of this story is, when you're pondering website content writing rates for your blogs, you get what you pay for. Going with the lowest bidder is not going to cut it in most cases, and runs a very real risk of incurring penalties to your SEO efforts for your troubles.
Going with the cheapest writers really can be far more costly than many realize. Save yourself the bother and look for rates which are reasonable. Anything beginning in the $15-$20 range for a typical blog is likely fine, although quality does generally scale with price. And at those prices, you have some room to experiment and try out different writers before finding one who fits your vision for the blog.
Just use your head and always remember that the Internet is not terribly regulated. Just remember the age old advice: Caveat emptor.
Image #1 sourced from (rightcopywriter.com)
