What's The Deal With WF Writers?

by Tom Slipkus

Posted: 11 years ago 31 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

I've been meaning to rant about this for a few weeks now, but after going through the pages of the Warriors For Hire section to look at what the Writers are offering, I just couldn't hold it in me for much longer.

I know there have been quite a few threads like this, but seriously - what are they thinking??

I went through the first 5 or 6 pages and I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. Remember, a few years back, when there would be talk here about how people are way underselling, giving their services for 10 bucks an article?

Well, it seems that even those people are now considered "expensive".

People getting work (judging from the reply and view count in their threads) are the ones selling their service for 20-40 cents per...100 words!

That's right - you can find headlines like "American Writers With English Bachelors degree - $1,99 per article".

The question I have is - how can you live off, writing an article for 2 dollars? Or, even better, how fast do you have to churn out articles to be able to sustain yourself?

I'm not even going to start about the people who buy these articles, or the poor chaps that have to read them - but I'm amazed that here, in the biggest marketing forum on earth, there isn't a market for high quality content.

My clients mostly aren't from here, at least I haven't found them through here, but I'm certain that all successful marketers have writers that produce high quality content and it's just strange to me that they don't use the Warrior forum, otherwise there would surely be a supply for high quality writers, which now there obviously isn't.

So, what's your take on this - is the market this way because good writers simply don't advertise themselves here, or do the people who need quality content simply don't look for it in the Warrior forum and writers have to go look elsewhere to find work?

#cheap labor #cheap writers #content creation #deal #quality articles #warrior forum writers #writers

Patrick 11 years ago

Any person who is good at his/her own field will never seek out for service here or in any other forum. A lot of people here are good at what they do, but you will never see them advertising their service, coz they are "good enough" to get it.

PS. Doesn't mean everyone there is not good.
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- Jeffery 11 years ago
  
  You may not realize it, but you are breaking a forum rule by starting a discussion about a topic and promoting your business pertaining to the topic in your signature.
  
  You may want to remove your signature only for this thread to avoid the possibility of the thread being deleted.
  
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curly sue 11 years ago

Yes thats right $2 per day is the average price for article. Very cheap for 2reasons;
1- Demand for articles has gone down.
Marketers have lost their faith in google, they would rather create videos or use paid traffic

2. People writing these articles live the other side of the world, where $2 is enough to get you by in a day. As opposed to the western world where $2 can get you a glass of water.
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- yukon Banned 11 years ago
  
  What's The Deal With WF Writers?
  
  Originally Posted by curly sue
  
  Marketers have lost their faith in google...
  
  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.
  
  Thanks
  
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Tom Slipkus

11 years ago

You may not realize it, but you are breaking a forum rule by starting a discussion about a topic and promoting your business pertaining to the topic in your signature.

You may want to remove your signature only for this thread to avoid the possibility of the thread being deleted.

Thanks for the advise, when you pointed it out it's kind of obvious that it was breaking the rules, although that wasn't my original intention, I haven't marketed myself here for a long time.

Yes thats right $2 per day is the average price for article. Very cheap for 2reasons;
1- Demand for articles has gone down.
Marketers have lost their faith in google, they would rather create videos or use paid traffic

2. People writing these articles live the other side of the world, where $2 is enough to get you by in a day. As opposed to the western world where $2 can get you a glass of water.

You really believe the demand has gone down?

Although I agree that videos are becoming a rather popular way of absorbing information, a good article still gets just as much, if not more attention - in my experience people do enjoy reading, if something is worth reading

As for your other point, that is true, but, at least if we were to believe what was advertised, the writers offering their service for 2 buckaroos are acually American.

Any person who is good at his/her own field will never seek out for service here or in any other forum. A lot of people here are good at what they do, but you will never see them advertising their service, coz they are "good enough" to get it.

PS. Doesn't mean everyone there is not good.

At some point, of course - if you're good, you'll have plenty of clients. But everyone has to start out some place - and for many reasons, some clear, some not so much, Warrior forum isn't a place a quality writer can find high paying work.

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Alexa Smith

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Gediminas

You really believe the demand has gone down?

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.

Originally Posted by Gediminas

Although I agree that videos are becoming a rather popular way of absorbing information, a good article still gets just as much, if not more attention - in my experience people do enjoy reading, if something is worth reading

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

Originally Posted by Gediminas

Warrior forum isn't a place a quality writer can find high paying work.

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).

Originally Posted by Humbee360

I tend to agree that Google has DE-valued article marketing

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.

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AlexandraMarch Banned 11 years ago

It's difficult to charge more for an article, unless you are an expert in that field. If you have extensive knowledge on a subject and write something truly original, than you will get paid more. If you just read some info online and than re-write them with your own words, it's not really such a hard job, so 2 $ is an appropiate amount.
Not to mention Curly Sue it's right, most people outsource to freelancers in foreign countries, where this amount is not that little.
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- MissTerraK 11 years ago
  
  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
  
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Humbee360 11 years ago

I tend to agree that Google has DE-valued article marketing, to a point where if you are looking for local services, you see it really fast, on Google and Bing too you see paid advertisements and that is all your going to get, so in essence, when you search for "Local Business, Glass company" you will get all kinds of paid advertisements, but if no local business companies are advertising you will not see that company listed.

Instead you see paid advertisements from a company like 400 miles away.

That is a huge mistake Google is making right now, I actually searched for a Glass company in my area, so that I could get a piece of glass cut, I live south of Atlanta and Google displays glass companies in Wisconsin...

Why Because they paid and no company in my area paid....

So yes, I think that Google has a great deal to do with why article marketing is dying a slow painful death.
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Jeffery 11 years ago

Gediminas,

In many ways I agree, but the situation is the same in other sections of this forum that offer services as well as sites outside of the WF. Fiver being one example.

It is not just here.. it is global. It is the nature of the beast.. Marketing. Nothing you can do about it excpept continue to charge good moeny for good articles and hopefully retain customers willing to pay good moeny for good quality. That in itself will build your reputation in a positive manner.

Most of the writers that charge very little also provide low qulaity articles in bulk. Their position is people will pay the same amount for 100s of low cost articles compared to one good quality article. Again, nature of the beast.. Marketing.

Like you I could rant about the cheap services in my field and almost mirror your post. Almost, lol. But I don't because I have attracted customers that know the difference between cheap services and quality services. That is not a reflection on my standards that I hold high, but more of a reflection of the end item that earns the customer an income. Again, nature of the beast.. Marketing.

You may want to offer the same low quality articles for the same cheap prices. Just tell your customers that you provide both cheap/low quality and expensive/high quality. In that way your customer knows that you are an honest marketer and they know what they are paying for at the end of the day...

... separates you from the writers who make big claims, get the fast sales, and never see them again.

Something to think about.

Jeffery 100% :-)
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AmandaT 11 years ago

I think the biggest reason the price is dropping is because more and more people are coming online and learning that you can write a few paragraphs and get paid. They look around and think, "Well, if I want to get any buyers, I need to be cheaper than all of these other people." From there the price just keeps dropping.

On the bright side there are just as many (if not more) awesome people out there that understand how valuable good content is. I just hope that those skilled writers that don't realize they're under-charging find a way out of the price hole they've stuck themselves in.
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SurrealPSD 11 years ago

Same thing happened in the graphic design biz. Everyone and their nan, armed with a copy of Gimp is now a 'graphic designer', and fervently hawking their wares to the lowest bidder.

Specialise to survive. There will always be demand for qualiy.
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laurencewins 11 years ago

I do advertise my services in the Warriors for Hire section and in my signature but I don't shove my service down anyone's throat. The people that want to pay for quality work often choose me. I have regular work and I also get ad hoc work from here and other sources.
The more places you advertise, the greater the chances are that you'll pick up work from unlikely people.
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- JohnMcCabe 11 years ago
  
  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.
  
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talfighel 11 years ago

The demand for articles has gone down as each year passes. People are starting to realize that this strategy is not working too well for them so they are ordering less and less.

Plus, there are so many writers now a days that everyone wants to get the job so they drop their prices as low as they can go. If one person charges $5, some smart writer will drop it to $4 because they want to get the job.

I don't know how you live on $2 per article unless you get 100 requests per day and you earn $200.
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Stuart Walker 11 years ago

I tend to agree that Google has DE-valued article marketing

Content marketing is alive and well and quite possibly bigger than ever. People are finally realising that you can't just slap together spun or $5 articles on your site if you want to create a serious site. More and more people are focusing on creating epic content.

For anyone with any faith in their writing abilities they would not be competing with the $2 article market, this is for people not native in English who are bad writers.
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Igor Fridrihs 11 years ago

There are plenty of good writers from poor countries. They are not bad, just life in their countries and workforce are much cheaper than we get in Europe or US.
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mervp 11 years ago

The other downward pressure on article writing is that people who do it as a primary moneymaker are competing for work with others who are doing it as a side income center, secondary to their main IM efforts.

The latter are not trying to get the pay rate that reflects their maximum worth, but just generating working capital to get by or cover temporary expenses while building their main empire from sites, lists, or reselling. This brings down expectations as to what the average writer can be charged, as there are so many who choose to value their writing as "part of their business plan" instead of as a main career.
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sbucciarel

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Gediminas

People getting work (judging from the reply and view count in their threads) are the ones selling their service for 20-40 cents per...100 words!

That's right - you can find headlines like "American Writers With English Bachelors degree - $1,99 per article".

The question I have is - how can you live off, writing an article for 2 dollars? Or, even better, how fast do you have to churn out articles to be able to sustain yourself?

They can live off of it because it doesn't take very long to produce garbage articles and they aren't American writers and don't have an English bachelor's degree. They live in countries where the cost of living is low. I've tested a couple of those out making those claims and the articles don't bear a close resemblance to English.

There are a lot of good writers on WF, but I don't know if they advertise in WFH section. The customers there tend to be looking for the bottom of the barrel in pricing and there's no shortage of "writers" competing at that level.

I have hired a couple of good writers from that section, and they weren't the cheapest ones, and they did a good job on the projects I gave them.

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biggerplay 11 years ago

Interesting thread. I think this is my 1st maybe 2nd post ever here, and I'm a complete noob when it comes to all this stuff but I find it fascinating. If I'm setting up a website, then I expect to either write the content myself (which I would of spent who knows how long researching or it's based upon my own experience) or I would only hire people who have an in-depth knowledge in the subject, the idea that I would spent $2 to hire someone to write an article is very strange to me.
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TheWordMagician 11 years ago

The commerical article writing space is essentially a tiered space. As such, there are writers and buyers at every tier, from the rock bottom price tiers to the $200 an artilce tier. You just have to know where you belong in that hierachy.
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I Am Attila 11 years ago

In my experience, there's a place where the cheap writers fit in, and there are places where higher quality writers are needed; experts if you will.

Cheap writers usually take the topic, hit up ezinearticles or some other site and take the ideas from various articles, and rewrite it from scratch into their own article without knowing a damn thing really about the topic they are writing about. All their work is unique, yet the idea their article talks about is just the same old recycled crap that's everywhere.
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colinph970

11 years ago

It really depends on your market and your skills as a writer. If you order these types of articles you'll find that they have very poor grammar, poor spelling and often make little sense. Good articles are worth paying for in my opinion. I am a writer who charges $34 for 700 words and I have no shortage of work.

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JohnMcCabe

11 years ago

Originally Posted by I Am Attila

In my experience, there's a place where the cheap writers fit in, and there are places where higher quality writers are needed; experts if you will.

Cheap writers usually take the topic, hit up ezinearticles or some other site and take the ideas from various articles, and rewrite it from scratch into their own article without knowing a damn thing really about the topic they are writing about. All their work is unique, yet the idea their article talks about is just the same old recycled crap that's everywhere.

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...)

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Brandon19811

11 years ago

You actually have a better chance of getting good rankings on search engines if you have a terribly written article with keywords stuffed into it. I have seen some of the crappiest sites rank well. I have seen articles that are so terrible that you have a hard time deciphering what they mean rank number one on Google. The good thing about having a terrible site with terrible articles is that it will have a high bounce rate. You can put quality banner ads, or Adsense will put targeted ads on a page. If the articles are such crap that nobody wants to read them, there is a higher likelihood that the traffic will bounce. Bouncing traffic will many times go through whatever advertisements are on the site. The user knows they cannot find the information on the site and decides to look elsewhere. The search engine already sent them to a crappy site. Why not click this ad and check it out. The purpose of marketing is to make money. It is a kind of manipulative way of doing things, but search engines reward crap. The engine owners will always try to eliminate bad quality information, but there is just too much stuff to manually review. A bot can only do so much.

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MissTerraK

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Brandon19811

If the articles are such crap that nobody wants to read them, there is a higher likelihood that the traffic will bounce. Bouncing traffic will many times go through whatever advertisements are on the site. The user knows they cannot find the information on the site and decides to look elsewhere. The search engine already sent them to a crappy site. Why not click this ad and check it out.

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

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substance 11 years ago

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.
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ParkerArrow 11 years ago

I think a better question might be "Why is there a demand for $5 articles?"
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