Where do you get your articles? How much do you pay?

That reminds me of people asking whether something will pass Copyscape, AFTER they know that the writing in question is completely 100% original and written by you. I'd like to goddamn win the odds on writing a Copyscape FAILING original article, because if I do, I must be about due for a lottery win or five. (And at these odds, I don't need to buy a ticket.. I'll find one on the street.)

A simplified version of my process, in a very small nutshell without going into the extensive details for each step:

1. Decide on niche to promote
Myself or my US-based team members do the initial legwork and brainwork. Sometimes it's just a matter of deciding to do more article marketing in a niche we're already in.

2. Outsource a list of 100 unique topics (cost: $3.00)
Via oDesk I seek a contractor on a flat-rate basis and pay them to create a unique list of 100-200 topics for the niche we're targeting. Total out-of-pocket cost so far: $3.00

3. Outsource article research (cost: $5.00)
I have a team of three researchers at oDesk. They are NOT the same contractors who provide me the list. I send each of them one of the topics from the 100-item list and pay them $1.11 per hour to research those topics. The research they provide has to be authoritative in nature, stuff from Web sites associated with universities, government, expert authors and the like (no stuff from article directories, no promotional stuff, no commercial press releases, no general Google search results). Each contractor sends me a doc file with the research they found, a summary of each resource, and a link for each item. Each researcher is required to complete the task in 1.5 hours (most do it in a single hour, because I have specifically targeted a certain type of contractor who have to do that sort of research and understand authoritative vs non-authoritative sources). Total out-of-pocket cost so far: $8.00

4. Outsource the article writing (cost: $20)
I then send three topics from the completed research (six sources per topic = 18 sources) to each of my experienced article writers. These are NOT the list provider, nor the researchers, they ONLY write my articles -- no research required. I expect to get twenty 500-word articles from each research topic, and I pay a flat rate of $20 for the twenty articles, rejecting any that don't meet our standards (I have them re-submit new ones). Total out-of-pocket cost so far: $28.00

I then repeat step four in groups of three research pieces at a time until I've doled them all out and have received back all of the completed articles. So I spend $3.00 on having a list created, $5.00 on research, and $1 per completed article. If I go through the entire list (which usually doesn't happen, I tend to prune off about 1/3 of the topics), I will end up with over 600 articles at a total cost of under $700.

There are some other key elements involved in getting the best bang for your buck, including the sorts of contractors you want to target, as well as another creative step that elevates good articles to great status. But this is essentially a really stripped-down version of my approach, and it has worked well for us -- but it took a lot of mistakes to get there.