How much do you spend a week/month on content?

Nothing, I find really good writers who believe in their niche and make them my slaves (partners) and then I we split the profits while I create the site and do all the marketing, promoting and monetizing. 50% Profits on all the sites I own with a bunch of highly motivated real content creators! When I write it, I set my timer to 30 minutes and get cracking.

ParkerArrow,

Good question here. You might find that the best blogs with the most followers spend more time in preparation for their writing than actually writing it. Good content is based off of real world information and sometimes that information can take a great deal of time to come up with. SEOMoz for example has many followers because they spend a great deal of time making highly informative blog posts. They do that by conducting surveys, running tests, and in general, putting forth a lot of effort to gather good data.

This is true for any industry. Think of all the preparation that goes into producing a few minute segment on a public news channel. Hundreds of people spend hours interviewing, researching, and writing in order to deliver accurate and useful information.

So, if content is an important component to your website’s success, (and you are making money with your website), it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to spend 30+ hours per week gathering data and writing. It is this kind of effort that produces a following that dwarfs all others and rivals that of traditional media outlets.

This post points out some of these essentials for building a following,

9 Ways to Build Followers for Your New Blog*|*MaxBlogger Stories

Naturally this is aimed at bloggers but it could apply to regular websites as well.

Shawn

$0, I write my own content.

BTW, the conventional IM thinking on content is 100% wrong.

If you want cheap or free content, offer people guest posting opportunities in exchange for backlinks. If you insist on not giving your writers a byline, tell them they can ghostwrite and share revenues. Nobody successful uses the "pay pennies for articles in broken English" strategy. It's just sold to you as a get rich quick scheme. Guest posting for backlinks and/or content licensing is the legit way to get cheap content. See huffpost, Business Insider, AskMen.com, etc.

For the sites I do this with, I spend about $50 per site each month right now, which isn't that much, but it fits my needs since I do most of the content creation myself. When buying content for on-site purposes, I'd rather have a few good articles than a ton of mediocre ones.

I normally spend upwards or $50 on content every week. I source high quality stuff and not "seo" rubbish and have been doing extremely well by focusing on quality for the end user.

I try to write as much of my own content as possible.

But, I get paid traffic.

Sometimes when my projects overextend themselves I'll outsource some articles, but for the majority of time (and as long as I'm in my comfort zone regarding niches) I write my own guides.



PS: I know this isn't always a good idea lol.

I always try to spend at least an hour when I wake up writing content..

$0. I create all my content myself.

It's not uncommon for me to invest 100-200 big macs on one article. When such articles are widely targeted directly to syndicated networks of hungry eyeballs, the ROI is equivalent to a pound or two of beluga caviar.