Articles (and other stuff) For $1

While it's still often hit-or-miss, I've had some good luck recently with Amazon's Mechanical Turk:

https://www.mturk.com/

If you aren't familiar with it already, it's Amazon's 'micro-task' site. You post tasks - virtually anything - and an army of 'micro-workers' go to work on it.

Tasks - Amazon calls them 'Hits' - can be nearly anything someone can do at their computer. I've been using it to have articles written on the cheap.

You specify how much you're going to pay. Needless to say, if you offer the equivalent of $.25/hr., it's going to be reflected in the quality you get. That said, most of these workers are in areas of the world where a dollar is good money. Please note: I'm not advocating 'slave wages', only that Amazon is essentially offering access to very low-cost labor. It's up to you to offer a reasonable payment. That said, it's important to recognize that a dollar or two per hour is a good wage for some of these workers who don't otherwise have many income opportunities.

The biggest issue I've had is that when I request articles, I often get copied material submitted. I always make sure to write that scraped or copied content will not be used or payed. It's very easy to take a few sentences from submitted work and drop it in Google in quotes - you'll immediately see if it's scraped (better & faster than Copyscape imo).

I'll also add that I've ended up with longer-term relationships with some good writers that I 'found' on mturk.

bfas