Having spent a couple of years within the freelance industry myself you may be very confused after reading this article heading. You only have to go on freelance websites like Fiverr to know there is thousands of services offering you paid articles for your community blog. But, after watching the market and sharing my own knowledge of the blogging world from experiences like this… I can share my ideas about why the market of paid articles is dying rapidly from been a good source of income. There are multiple reasons for this and I would also like to hear your opinions of this situation at the end of the article to see if you agree with me and my comments.
A higher amount of services
One reason why doing paid articles is not a valuable option for a freelancer nowadays is because thousands of others are offering the same service maybe even for less money. This takes away the high demand that this service once had and spreads it out over multiple services. Ultimately, the cheaper the service, the less people will want to pay for these services which can create a sense of you needing to lower your prices despite the fact that your service is most likely of a much higher quality. This is a big reason why I have found that people do not see as many sales. I offer these same types of services but include less words per dollar but mine is most likely of a higher quality than the people offering a larger article for the same price (I have seen many services that suggest this also)
The recession
hich is either mainly a big part of a hobby or something that provides a very small income of which is not a safe bet during this recession. I have seen many people tend to leave the blogging scene because they can not afford to maintain it for the little they get back.There is no denying that the recession has had a massive impact on all types of businesses and money going to the freelancer. The main reason that I think this, correct me if I am wrong, is that people are less willing to spend money on getting articles on there blog w
Guest blogging
Now, this is the main reason I felt like writing this article. Recently I have been trying to find some people to guest post articles to Dojo Blog so that there could be more content written from a different perspective from authors very talented in their field. This has helped to bring in many more topics to the blog which I hope you can look forward too soon so stay tuned! Anyway, this led me to think… A coupe of years ago I would of spent around $6 per article just to have something like this done on my blog because that was how we used to get articles from different people. However since the SEO boom, a great way of getting traffic is to guest post on someones blog with original content which can pass users onto their site after viewing the authors bio. Many people are now very happy and willing to do this and it is a benefit to both the blog and the writer. The best thing is, it’s free! You still get great quality posts because people want to be able to sell themselves to the users but it cuts out the costs for simply posting a few links in the author bio. This makes it a lot cheaper for a blog to employ this tactic than to hire paid writers.
I really do think guest blogging is the way to go for the future and it really is cost effective but allows for great articles. I really do think this causes harm to people out there who write paid articles as a freelance service and I do not blame people for going for the free method, why wouldn’t you? The final thing I have also been thinking over is if guest posting was something that would totally wipe out paid articles? I thought about this over the night before taking to the keyboard to write this and I have come to the conclusion that it will not totally wipe out paid article writers but it will in fact wipe out the majority. Why won’t it fully wipe it out? Well that is simple, guest bloggers are only really willing to write on blogs that get a good level of exposure, have a great page rank, allows do follow links and other things that guest blog writers find important. Therefore starting a new blog will most likely not attract many guest bloggers unless a huge potential is seen with the blog. That is one scenario where I think paid articles can still be used – for the newer, less exposed blogs.
Really interesting ideas, Martin.
I do find the content writing niche to be over saturated with a lot of bad and yet very cheap service providers. Most of them are willing to post for few bucks and many webmasters agree to publish them, just to have some content.
I have tried this myself (as a buyer) and in most cases I paid the article and never posted it: it was that bad 😀
Guest blogging, if done properly can help both the guest and the blog owner. The first one gets exposure (links + traffic) and the latter a great article. This does have to be done carefully though, since not all guest blog posters provide original or quality articles. So the level still needs to be high 🙂
Hey Roach, I remember there was a time when paid articles were very important. But now a days it has lost it’s importance. Today guest blogging is the key.