Thank you for your feedback. I know, from a SEO-perspective 250 seems to be not that much ... but if have a mixed focus on short tail and long tail keywords, even those "posts" can get you some visitors on a constant basis.

I could write thirty articles today.

I doubt many of them would be any good, though.

fLufF
--

Motivation is not something to have but rather something to do.

For me, the vision of having an authority website in a niche that I really enjoy ... is quite a big motivation. If you want to build authority sites, you have no other choice but writing a lot of articles (if you don't want to spend money for outsourcing hundreds of articles).

What could you do to motivate yourself?

The thing is: this strategy works ... for ME. As I've written I already have a website with about 2000 articles that gets decent traffic in various ways. Since I'm making a living off of it, guess that's not completely unprofitable.

I don't mind to argue on those things, everyone has to choose his own strategy ... but I'd like to read more about your ideas (honestly).

Thanks!

Hey, if it's working for you, more power to you.
It's just that most of us who are using articles to drive traffic have done that sort of thing before, and we know how well it doesn't work compared to other methods.

And, by comparison we know how well proper article syndication, using very well written articles that we produce only a few of per month, makes a lot more money-- and a lot easier.

It sounds like you have a very strong drive-- If you were to invest that energy writing longer, higher quality articles and developing relationships with publishers, you would find that you get a lot more traffic, and it will convert into sales much more readily.

This post by myob, who has been using it for 14 years, sums it up quite nicely.

This one by Alexa gives you an excellent guideline for writing so that publishers syndicate your work quite happily.

Yes, I enjoy writing ... but it depends on the topic. Today I got quite a few articles done about topics I don't like that much.

Again: I don't want to impress somebody. I don't have to sell anything. I don't even have a Link to one of my sites in my profile. All I want to share are some ideas that might be helpful to one or two readers.

There are kinds of articles I would never get done either on one day - articles that involve a lot of creativity and personality.

On the other hand there are articles that are just about information. And those can get done faster with the right focus.

Yes.

Since the topics I wrote about are clearly focused on facts (no motivating stuff or something), there's not a lot of originality involved.

When you are in the zone anything possible. The mind is capable of many amazing things I've been told. 30 articles a day is great mate -- you can use spinner to make it into 1000 and use it all year round.

That's pretty cool to write 30 article per day. I have a hard time writing one article per day. Once I'm done, I'm constantly rereading the article, trying to fix all the grammatical errors. I always find one, every single time I read the article, lol. If I had the time, I could maybe do three articles a day but I would have to put the whole day aside to do that. I usually go 4 hours straight and stop only to make cups of tea. I always have a cup of tea with me while I work, it soothes me. I take one big break and then keep going.

You can still produce good content if you're writing a massive amount of articles per day. It's all about the material and the research you put into the articles beforehand. I'm big believer in research and outlines! Congrats to you... Hopefully I can get up to 5 a day without going completely insane on editing. Do you get someone to proofread your work or you do all the editing yourself?

I'm quite confident that I wouldn't want to write thirty articles in one day, personally. Let me explain why.

I like to compare my articles to cuisine. Not the food found at fast food joints with a drive by window, but the cuisine that is found in fine dining establishments.

If I toss out bland generic food like a fast food joint, my hungering readers and visitors will taste junk food and drive away after spitting out the poor quality stuff and will still be left with a nasty aftertaste in their mouth determined not to return.

However, if I serve them quality cuisine to satiate their hunger and thirst for quality information, they'll linger and savor the flavor of the content, compliment the chef, share the name of the fine dining establishment with their friends and return often.

I just think that it is vitally important to search for and put in the finest ingredients into my article which requires time rather than just throwing in random low quality ingredients just to have something to toss out in paper wrappers.

Quality beats quantity every time.

Of course, this is just my personal opinion.

Terra

Yepper. We'll be the judge of the quality.

I can stir up 30 of them articles from a bowl of alphabet soup in just one sitting.

[DELETED]

I will, if it is well written and captures my attention. I personally prefer them to shorter post length articles - those strike me as more an ad with nothing much to say than an article. I don't think I can argue too hard concerning the apparent drop in people's attention span though. A seemingly apparent correlation to the flood of information we now get in the 21st century.

I'm gonna jump on the "you're wrong" bandwagon here. let's take a look at a few niches that I am a reader (but not a marketer) in:

1. Comedy: The site I visit the most for this niche? Cracked. Why? Because they put out at least 3 2,000 word articles a day. I haven't seen another comedy website able to bring the same quality in shorter written pieces.

2. Sports: I'm on ESPN throughout the day, every day. Are there short blog posts? Sure; but they are only to relay a piece of news. The best pieces are the in depth analysis columns. All of those are well over 1,000 words.

3. Politics: Now you would think this niche would be dominated by small, digestible talking points. For those who are really into the mechanics of how government is being run though, this couldn't be further from the truth. Politics is a complex topic, with many articles going very high up into the thousands.

Now, perhaps this can all be boiled down to just another "personal opinion" on what type of content works best. In my three niches that are mentioned though, I am just one of millions of readers. I'd say the longer content is being read, otherwise the audience would not remain that large.

My .02 on the matter.

Completely agree. I was just going to post this.

This can be true. But it isn't when you're looking for some very specific information with a clear question in mind.

By the way, I don't need a proof reader for grammatical things, but we have an expert who makes sure that the content itself is fine and who ensures publically that its correct.

Many people are doing keyword research, pick a niche they have absolutely no knowledge about (even if correct information is critical, let's say for example in the health "niche") ... and I guess they'd get less resistence from some of you when they were going for writing long low-quality articles and still need a lot of time for this ... (I don't mean Alexa) ... but ... why?

Because it messes up with people when they see someone doing something they think they are not capable of.

---

What I'v learned in this thread is:

- article syndication needs a different kind of content than the one that works well for my purpose (right now)
- article syndication will be more reliable in the long run than the google-dependend stuff I'm doing
- I'm going to split the content for my second project into fast-written (but still, high quality - just to make sure some of you are getting mad again ) and content with the purpose of article-syndication and long-term benefits

Yeah okay, well, let us know how all of that works out for you.




Whoa, thanks for another great post henkit1 but my favorite one from you is still this one... Thank you for the great info!

Hi Iris,

thanks for your post!

I'm beginning to write for two niches, but in the past I just wrote for only one.

That is what's helping me getting done a lot of articles - but let me tell you, there are good days (as the one that was the reason for creating this thread) and days, where I don't get handled that much. This is why I started to think about what makes the difference.

1. Bring yourself in the right state

For me it doesn't work to write for a niche I have no interest in dominating it in the long haul.

I think about writing those articles as part of a mission. For me, it's less about the money rather than creating a high-value, authority-page, that really helps people.

Every little article get's me one step closer to my goals. I imagine how my website is huge and full of impact.

2. Research keywords / ideas

Google Keyword Tool works fine, although I've switched to another tool (search for Fraser's keyword strategy tool) because it's more comfortable for managing big lists of keywords for me. Not definitely needed, but a little luxury to me and one of only very few tools that I use at all.

Beyond, I'm a fan of real books. The quality of a content of a good book is far beyond many of those average or crappy things out there on the internet. Books can give you tons of topics to write about.

No matter how you do it - build a long list of ideas.

3. Research content

I either work with 2-3 books at a time or with no book at all.

When I only use online information, I'm going to google one of the topics I'd like to write about. I copy 2-5 of them together which I like most in a word document (including the place where I've found them to reference them at the end of the article, which is highly recommended if you're writing for a niche where information quality is really critical).

I do this for a couple of topics one after another.

4. Write that article

My goal is simple:

Writing an article that's better than those 2-5 articles.

My article could be better because it either:

- contains more information by combining the information of different articles
- structure them in a better way
- make them easier to understand for non-professionals
- adding a ressource section at the end with the best articles I've found

5. High quality, but not perfect

To be honest, I don't even proof-read my articles anymore. I don't change anything when I've completed the last sentence.

Misspellings are obvious when they are live-checked by MS Word. Grammatic errors are really rare now that I've written so much (in German ...).

My goal is to make that article BETTER than the one I've found in step 3.

My goal is NOT to make them PERFECT.

6. Repeat step 4 and 5

... next article ... (already prepared in step 3)

7. Quality-assurance

Articles where I don't feel sure enough about the correctness (although I write down the references at the end) as well as the most important articles I send to a professional for feedback.


Hope it helps,

lifesofree