When you are building several niche sites altogether on your own while maintaining several niche blogs at the same time, you won’t have any recourse but to outsource some articles. Unless if you are a full time Internet Marketer (IM) and all you do is research and write articles the whole day then that wouldn’t be a problem. But if you are doing this part time like me because of some sensible reasons that you can’t leave your 8 hour job behind then you can’t produce all the needed articles that you need without sacrificing your social life and time needed by your wife and kids.
It is costly to outsource articles, therefore it is advised that you write you own posts at the start especially if your budget is very limited. But if you have the resources to do so or as soon as you make some money from Google AdSense, then you may have the option to start outsourcing articles to build more informative niche sites.
Outsourcing Articles is Not Bad
Aside from time, your limited knowledge of certain niches (which you think are profitable) is another reason why you will be compelled to outsource them. Although there are a few people whom I know who could write any topic that is presented to them. But in my case, I am not one of them. I have worked in the finance world for more than ten years, so how do you expect me to write articles about panic attacks, erectile dysfunction, broken relationships, late menstruation, etc.
Outsourcing articles is not bad in my opinion and some successful IMs out there are doing this especially those who do not want to hire their own writer. If you have 10 AdSense niche sites, things won’t be complicated but when you are already maintaining and building more than 20 sites, then you will need additional help for you to move on and cope up with the competition that is going on Online.
Do Outsourced Articles Have Quality
Not all articles that you are going to outsource will have good quality. Some will be written poorly while others will surpass your standards. In my experience usually 15% – 20% does not pass my standards. It will be on your own discretion whether to return the articles that have low quality to be re-written or you could edit them yourself. If the article is total rubbish or spun, I usually return it to them to be re-written.
The first thing you have to do when you outsource articles is to check first if these are not duplicate content. You may use copyscape.com or you may just copy and paste 2 or 3 sentences with quotes (e.g. “xxxxx”) then search it in Google. If no exact match has been found, it only means that this article has not been posted or has not yet been indexed. Take note, no software can detect duplicate content real time.
If the article passes through this test then the next thing you have to do is to read them and do some research along the way. Once you are satisfied, add more content by expanding further on what was written; if you ordered 400+ words article, make it 500+ to 700+ and make sure everything is well edited and the quality of information will surely answer the queries of Internet users.
What I Do When Outsourcing Articles
This is the part where most IMs make mistake. After making sure that the outsourced articles have passed duplicity, they just slap the whole article to their site or to other sites which they want the article to appear. Not knowing that some articles have poor readability and doesn’t make sense. You can easily pass the spelling and grammar checker of MS Word even if the article doesn’t say something sensible. So the most important thing for you do next is to read the article and try to probe if the idea being expressed has any sense or not.
It is your responsibility to make your outsourced article provide quality information and for it to stand out; especially with the recent Google Algorithm update that affected many sites. So right now you have to provide useful information that would really benefit Internet users.
Latest Google Farmer Update
There were many varying opinions about the latest Algorithm updates but to give you an idea what the change was all about read the quote below:
“…it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.” source – Finding High-Quality Sites in Search
It didn’t define what really high-quality sites are but I observed that Wikipedia.org, About.com, Howstuffworks.com, etc are now dominating first pages of some long tail keywords. Some information presented are not even written professionally that a sixth grade will be able to write the same article within minutes. Just because the site is of high-quality does not mean that any article that will be posted in them will rank highly which is very unfair in my opinion. Anyway I will discuss my opinion regarding this matter on another post.
So to Conclude
Outsourcing articles is not a bad idea especially if you are already making money from Google AdSense via your niche sites. It will make life easier for you and you could focus on building more profitable sites that would bring you more money in the future. Just make sure that you proof read and edit an article before slapping it in your posts.
