What's The Deal With WF Writers?

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That's the reason writers around here have to deal with so many people wanting articles for peanuts, a lot (most) of the people on this forum that target Google traffic think they need articles for ranking a web page (fail).

No offense to the real writers around here, but I wouldn't buy an article from anyone on this site simply because the majority think articles equal SEO (wrong again).

This whole fascination with people around here thinking articles equal SEO is from the masses submitting junk articles to article directories for backlinks.

Years later you have a lot of so called writers engaged in the ultimate race to the bottom (fiverr anyone?).

Good luck with that.

I don't, at all: I think it continues to increase exponentially, just as do the numbers of people "coming into internet marketing".

It's always seemed to me that the prices are in inverse proportion to the number of their respective potential service-providers (not necessarily the number of their potential customers!).

By the time you get down (and I do mean "down") to the $5-per-article market (or even less - as you say, it's theoretically possible to buy them for $2 now!), there are almost more service-providers than customers.

There are people here selling articles for $200 and quietly providing their regularly returning customers with them, without ever needing to advertise at all. Those are writers whose customers know how to use the product, survive and flourish, and they don't have to replace them all the time. Then there are others advertising $5 articles. Their customers don't know how to "do article marketing" at all (obviously - otherwise they wouldn't be buying them). They know only about "article directory marketing", so their own businesses tend not to survive. So, from their writers' perspectives, they need to replace their clients all the time and therefore need to advertise continually. And those are - clearly - the ones you see advertising.

In other words, as is so often the case in all kinds of marketing, both online and offline, what you see "promoted" isn't necessarily what's selling and surviving, and isn't necessarily representative of the true market at all. :p

Add to that the fact that most people arriving in this forum and asking "How should I start to earn some money online?" are - irrespective of their apparent standard of literacy - told "Write articles for marketers", and you can see why the product-availability at the very bottom end of the market is so huge.

I agree. I think that's putting it mildly, in fact. The "video market" seems to be another "service-provider-led" rather than "customer-demand-led" market. All the people I know who've experimented with video marketing of various kinds and tested methodically, intelligently and constructively have actually abandoned them. This thread contains an interesting "Warrior overview": http://www.warriorforum.com/off-topi...o-content.html

That's for sure! The buyers here have been consistently and inexorably trained, over the last 3-4 years "only to buy cheap stuff".

Also, let's not forget that different people mean very different things by the word "article".

To you and to me, Gediminas, it means something that people are going to read and enjoy and learn something from, and which makes them want to read more.

To many others it means only "a chunk of keyword-optimized nonsense which has been copied from somewhere and fed through a spinner and a backlink can be attached to it". Those are typical of "$2-$5 articles". In other words, they're not really articles at all! :p

(By the way, just in case anyone wonders about my motivation for making these remarks, I'm not myself a service-provider at all, and haven't been for over 4 years, now).

I hope it hardly needs to be said, but this really isn't right at all.

It's article directories that Google has de-valued, not article marketing.

All those Panda and Penguin updates have actually been helpful to article marketers (as so many of us have been pointing out here, so consistently, in so many threads, over the last couple of years). Article marketing, successfully used, has never had much to do with SEO anyway.

I can only speak for myself of course, but I believe other writers operate on the same premise.

I don't advertise in the Warrior For Hire section because the people searching that section simply aren't the market I target. I don't mean any disrespect to any writer that does advertise there at all, as I don't know them or their back story, but I liken it to any other place of business whether it is a restaurant or department store.

Those that operate a fine dining establishment don't worry what McDonald's or Burger King is serving and those that own Saks Fifth Avenue don't worry about what clothing K-mart or Walmart has hanging on the racks.

Terra

From what I've seen, there seems to be a huge misunderstanding of the word "marketing" - many seem to confuse it with "price war".

My late grandfather used to say that if you give a kid a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail...

Give a starving wannabe writer a chance to compete on price rather than talent or skill and, well, you can guess the rest.

As for video, I think there will be a parallel race to the bottom, fueled mainly by a similar dichotomy in the meaning of a 'video' that Alexa applied to 'article'. For some people, videos are filled with interesting content presented with good production values. For others, it's any bit of animated trash that can be pushed into a file format YouTube will accept.

When you worship at the altar of backlinks, nothing else matters.

An even bigger problem arising from that strategy is that most of the articles created that way tend to be 'factually challenged.' Heck, most of them wouldn't know a real fact if it bit them on the arse. And you'd be amazed how many of them skip the "rewrite it from scratch" part - it's just one from column A and two from column B.

(Bonus points for anyone who gets the reference...)

I'm not sure I agree with this thinking at all.

For me personally, if I find a crappy article, I can't get to the "X" button fast enough. You know, kind of like seeing a lily white fat body on a tropical beach. You cover your your eyes and groan, turning away quickly. Your eyes don't linger there to see what you might find appealing on them like sunglasses, sun visor or bathing suit. Your eyes avert and search out a better view.

Terra

I don't know about you guys but I ordered some articles from the " Hire section" and I was pleased to get some really good articles.
I am also using the free review copy article that they wrote on my website.