Just got offered $1 for unique article and $0.25 for rewrite! Wahhh

I've been watching the exchange between Dan Rinnert and LittleMike from a somewhat detached perspective. I think you could swap professions and come away with virtually the same argument.

Both put a higher value on the skill they've spent time and sweat building, while seeing what the other does as simple.

Part of the answer here is in the difficulty nailing down the definition of 'quality article'.

For many writers, quality means expressing complete thoughts with proper spelling and grammar. It means having the facts arranged in a way that the reader comes away having gained value.

For many of the marketers hiring cheap article writers, that definition can actually run counter to what they need. For an article marketer, a quality article has the right word count, contains the phrases they want to emphasize for search rankings, and passes Copyscape or another dupe-checker. It should give just enough vague information that a reader will click through and possibly purchase a product that promises more complete information. And it should do those jobs as cheaply as possible.

In many cases, the two viewpoints are totally antithetical to each other. So the arguments will continue as long as we choose to call both animals "articles"...

Well then you can say you're not really buying an article, you're *investing* in his writing. Subtle difference, but it's there nonetheless.

But I wasn't challenging CDarklock's writing skill (I've never read anything he's written so I can't be one to judge). I was challenging a pricing scheme based on the results it gives the buyer. In my experience, a blog post is a blog post. This is not always the case, of course, and your mileage may vary.

Really? A single article? I didn't realize Google's algorithm was so sensitive that a single article toppled the leader from first page. Is that why Facebook is 2nd today instead of Google? I guess everyone is too busy playing Farmville. Sorry guys, if you had just posted one more article, big G wouldn't have taken the lead!

Of course I'm being snarky, but that's only because that statement is ridiculous. There is no way in hell that one article changed a website's ranking. The internet is too much of an entity in flux for that to happen. Sites jump around a couple of spots constantly. And I guarantee it's not because of one-upmanship like that.


And that had absolutely nothing to do with the niche, how many searches are performed per day on the keywords you optimized for, how many backlinks each site has, how many authority backlinks each site has, forms of paid and non-paid advertisement, or even the design of the site itself even? Again there are a slew of variables involved in traffic that would explain the variance in traffic far better than "oh well it had better articles on it." Unless the two sites were exactly the same except for the articles, then your theory is full of holes.


And how many of them are blaming it on their articles being written by some guy in the Philippines for $1/article or a US native for $100? None. I have yet to see a single person complain that they are no longer ranking because they paid less for a mediocre article versus some fine crafted work that they paid as much as an iPod for.


Again, I have never seen that either. But again, if you're paying $1 an article for something that's barely in English, I wouldn't be surprised. Funny enough, I still see a bunch of writers that are looking to do $5 articles, though. And they're not afraid to advertise. The ones that charge $50 an article don't like to advertise their prices, though. I always found that to be funny.


Oh so 65% of America is working the full 8 hours a day (minus their breaks) every day, 40 hours a week? Wow, I guess Facebook's millions of site visitors are from the unemployed, right? Absolutely not. People are paid for their time. Yes some jobs require you to put in a good hard 8 hours work every day, but they are the minority. At my J.O.B, if there's nothing to do, I sit at my desk and watch the paint peel. Either that or I work on long term projects, or I make up something to do just so I'm not bored. I get paid to be there in case something goes wrong. And I'm hourly. And there are about 150,000 other people at my job that do the same.

The point is this: You are paid for your time as an employee. If you don't produce, that means you get fired. If you do a mediocre job, you still get paid the same amount of money your position warrants.


The worker gets paid at their hourly rate. If that toy doesn't sell at all, the worker still gets paid. If the toy sold well, he still gets paid his hourly rate. But I understand what you're saying and I still disagree. A mediocre article can have the same longevity as a great article for a fraction of the price. You're taking the example of a produced goods industry and comparing it to an intellectual property business when they are two separate things. The knockoff Rolex the guy tried to sell me in Times Square still tells the time just as well as the real thing. But comparing like things, the guy that wrote the pilot for The Office didn't start out making the money he makes now. Neither did the guy who wrote CSI. Was the quality of their writing any different then it is now? No, probably not. But they became *known* for what they did and it raised their quote. That is called branding and has absolutely nothing to do with quality of writing and all about marketing.

Put that way makes a lot more sense. However, it doesn't say anything about quality of your work (which may be spectacular, as I've said, I never read anything of yours). What it does say, though, is that you are targeting a different market. A market that is willing to pay more for your blog posts because it is of a higher value to them. The point of this entire thread was that there is a place for $5 articles and a place for $50 ones. I have no need for a guy that can crank out the next A Tale of Two Cities so I would not pay $100 for an article. If I was the owner of ZDNet, I would probably pay a hell of a lot more than $100 for a quality article. The same job is required, but the quality is wholly different.