I recently set the goal of creating 20 profitable niche sites in 2013.
I quickly came to the realisation that, with my day job and family commitments, there was absolutely NO WAY I was going to get this done if I was going to write all the content myself.
We are talking a minimum of 10 articles per site. Each article a minimum of 1,000 words.
If I do the maths for you its 20 sites x 10 articles x 1,000 words = 200,000 words. Basically I would need to write a novel in my spare time…not going to happen.
So I decided to outsource my article through iWriter (thanks to the Empire Flippers Boys for showing me this resource).
BENEFITS OF IWRITER
Cost – Really cheap to get articles done – We are talking about 0.7 cents per word to get articles done. This is super cheap in the freelance writing world
Turn-around – Turn around time is less than 24 hours when you open up your writing jobs to the entire community
Build up a list of great writers – If a writer creates an article you like then you can add them to your ‘favorites’. You can then submit articles just to your list of favorites…I love this.
LESSONS LEARNED
Some of the articles I got back have been great, and some have been completely useless. Here are the lessons I have learned about how to get better content.
TRIAL IT FIRST
I trialed the service first with a single article to see what it was like. The article wasn’t epic but it wasn’t either. Glad I trialed the service before I went for it.
DON’T BATCH PROCESS – REQUEST INDIVIDUAL ARTICLES
iWriter allows you to simply paste in the keywords you want to target and get bulk articles written for it.
So what did I do? For my new niche site I simply pasted in the 14 keywords I wanted to go after and requested them in bulk.
The problem was about half of the articles I got back weren’t really targeting the keyword in the right way.
So moving forward I will submit each article on it’s own with more specific details about what I want that article to be about. This should minimize the irrelevant articles I am getting back.
FACTOR IN (A LOT) OF EDITING TIME
For $5 for a 700 word article, or $7.50 for a 1,000 word article I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece. However, I was hoping I could simply copy and paste the articles into my niche site.
This has not been the case. Each articles needs to be edited and formatted so it flows and truely adds value to the reader. Much easier than writing the articles myself (I smashed out 2 x 1,000 word articles in less than 1 hour) but still time intensive.
SAVE THE BEST FOR YOURSELF
The writing is decent but I think I will still write the feature article myself.
This is the article for the main keyword I am targeting.
I will make it a mega article (2,000 words plus) and will add heaps of value
WRITE YOUR ARTICLE LAST
I could have gone ahead and written the feature article first. However, I would have had to do a lot of research.
The great thing about getting 14 other articles written on the same topic is that other people do the research for you.
All I have to do is pull the best information from each of the 14 articles that were written for me, rewrite it and BAM. I just saved myself hours of research time.
TEST EVERYTHING BEFORE YOU GO ALL IN
I am already playing with the house’s money (reinvesting the profits of my websites) but I don’t want to go “all in” until I know the process works.
So I got 25 articles written (total investment = $125). 15 were for 2 brand new sites and 10 were for an existing niche site already making $50/month.
The test is to see whether or not these articles rank in the search engines and drive profit greater than the $125 I invested in them. The faster I can get my $125 back the better…because then I can go again and go faster.