Article quality and pay

5 replies
I was wondering how much you guys pay for outsourced articles and the quality of them?

I recently listed a job on elance and I have gotten a fair amount of response. Everyone seams good and I'm sure that no matter who I pick their articles will be able to pass EZineArticles first time.

But the problem is the little things. The cheaper guys dont have the same kinda flow as the more expensive guys, if that makes any sense. I could read an article by both but I would enjoy the one by the more expensive person more.

The difference is about 5 dolars per article for the cheap guys and about 12 an article for the expensive guys.

What do you guys usually pay per article? Do you guys stress over the little stuff, or just go with what will pass and if need do a little tweaking afterwards?
#article #pay #quality
  • Profile picture of the author blogginvixen
    Well the old adage holds true: you get what you pay for!

    I'm a writer so my opinion may be a little biased, but when I need to offload work on a fellow freelance writing buddy I simply either give them the full payout I would have received or at the least $15 per article depending on what the topic is I'm writing on.

    I've also been in the low pay scale provider demographic as well and have paid $5 per article and still received quality work. However, when I think about if I'm able to survive on that type of pay rate, I always up the rate.

    The problem is I still get low quality writers demanding higher pay when their writing sucks (for a lack of a better word), is plagiarized, or just doesn't flow well!
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  • Profile picture of the author OSContent
    As someone who has managed dozens of freelance writers over the past 5 years, I would suggest that you start by narrowing down your options to the mid-to-low bid range (unless you're adding the articles to an authority site which requires some type of expert). From there, look at portfolios and listed skills, rather than the quality of the samples. The quality of writing samples is typically inflated for low-to-mid range bids, since they have all the time in the world to write and research the sample, but will need to rush through your project in order to make a decent return.

    To be more specific, look for writers who list the topic of your project (or at least related topics) as an area of expertise. If the writer you select has already accumulated a vast amount of information on your particular topic, they won't need to do much research in order to write high-quality articles. Since you're picking mid-to-low bids, this is good for you, since writers generally cannot afford to put a significant amount of time into these articles. On average, I think you'll find that a $5 article from someone who has an interest in the topic (and reads about it regularly) will be at least as good as a $10 article from someone who has no specific attachment to the topic.
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    • Profile picture of the author kamilrazak
      I think it depends on what you want to do with your articles. If you want to put it on your site and what to increase the revisit rate, maybe you can choose the expensive ones if you can afford. If you're doing this for links, decent articles that are good enough to be approved my article directories are sufficient.
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      • Profile picture of the author nick1123
        Originally Posted by kamilrazak View Post

        I think it depends on what you want to do with your articles. If you want to put it on your site and what to increase the revisit rate, maybe you can choose the expensive ones if you can afford. If you're doing this for links, decent articles that are good enough to be approved my article directories are sufficient.
        I think you are exactly right. It all depends on what you're going to use the articles for.

        Personally, I don't want to have to rework or tweak anything. So I am willing to pay more for well-written articles.
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        • As someone who has worked with ghost writers for the past 4 years, I can tell you there is no easy answer to this. I've paid some writers as much as $50 for an article only to find out their work sucked and wasn't any better than the $5/article writer. When it comes to writers, it's hit and miss.

          Having said that, I've found that $10-$12/article is the sweet spot for articles that are as close to turnkey as possible (they still need minor tweaking).

          So what I do is this...I pay $12-$15 for articles that will go on my site or distributed to EzineArticles. These are articles that need to be higher quality without a lot of tweaking and editing. I will then pay $5/article to have them rewritten for mass distribution, blogs, etc.

          If you can't afford $10-$12/article (or don't want to pay that), you can get "average" quality for $5/article but expect lots of editing and tweaking.

          Travis
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          TVS Internet Marketing: Helping small businesses get more visibility & sales online.
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