I am so worked up right now over an e-mail I just received from someone who bid to write articles for me that I wanted to share with you some insight into what to pay for article writing.
First, some background: I run almost 300 real estate websites and constantly am looking for someone to write great content for us. So, I e-mailed some people that have done some work for us in the past and asked for bids for what they would charge per article written. I got responses all over the board from $1 per article up to $75 per article and some even quoted up to $5o per hour to research and write.
I am not worked up over what people were asking for the articles: I would gladly pay $75 per article and in fact, I am willing to pay much more but it needs to be an article that actually performs. Let me explain.
If someone writes an amazing article that gets indexed well in search engines, gets people interested to read it and converts visitors that read it to actually purchase the product/service that we are marketing on that or a nearby page I’d gladly pay a hefty part of my profits for an article of that quality and performance.
The challenge is that I can’t tell if the guy that is bidding $1 per article is even worth the $1 just like I can’t tell if the guy bidding $75 per article is worth $75. They might both be low bids and I’d be willing to pay them up to $574 (or more) for one article… if it performed well. Similarly, if the guys $1 article is total garbage, its not even worth my time to read it to tell him that.
So, how can I pay someone who is writing articles what they’re worth? Well, I do it by agreeing to pay them a percentage of all sales generated from their articles. I show them a particular product/service that I have and give them a width berth to write about anything related to that product/service. Then, I have them use an affiliate tracking code and use a call to action to encourage people to buy my product/service with the writer’s affiliate code.
Most of my products are about $25 or $59 each and I am willing to pay 40%. So, if they make one sale they make between $10 and $23.60 for each sale. If the writer can really write, they should make a lot more than $75 for writing the article because a great article can get thousands of page views and even a modest conversion rate means far more than $75 in compensation. If their article is horrible, they’re paid exactly what it was worth to me. Which brings me back to why I am so worked up: this person who e-mailed me and had bid to write articles for me is complaining about writing articles.
To the writer that e-mailed me: if you want to get paid hourly to write garbage, then go find some other sucker. If you can really write like you claim you can, then I’ll pay you a lot more than the $X per hour that you wanted for your articles, but it will be based on how good your article is measured by the only thing that matters: does it actually get indexed, read and truthfully convince people that the products/services we provide are a great value for them and worth trading their dollars for (sales are made). All nonsense about keyword frequency, how well structured your sentences are, how you can spell without spell check and how you can write 10 articles an hour (or one every 8 hours because you really do your homework) mean zilch to me.
I guess you can see that I strongly believe article writers should be paid based on performance. If you do want to earn more than the measly $4 to $15 that some people are paying for articles, you can join our affiliate program and earn what you’re really worth.
Until my next post,
James
