I will admit I have woefully neglected this blog. I have a problem.
I am much better at maintaining a monogamous relationship with the occasional three-way,
than I am maintaining a polygamous relationship with several needy partners. I
will always pick favorites. In this case, my favorite is
Essa on Everything,
because it lets me do dirty, dirty things to it. This site is more of my ‘missionary
only with the occasional doggy style’ partner. It might be boring, but it
deserves my attention, so I will try to treat it better in the future.
Today’s post is about content management, with a focus on
articles as opposed to other media, as articles tend to be the most search
engine easy.
It amazes me that people still go to low end content mills
or hire someone who charges $1.25 to get their content for their sites, out of
simple cheapness. Especially when that cheap, broken English content winds up
costing them more in the end.
To give you a basis of comparison, I will bring up the world’s
oldest profession; prostitution.
Let me break it down for you. I recently watched a
documentary called “Whore’s Glory”. In this documentary, the makers took a look
at several different…let’s call them Bordellos. I like that word.
Anyway, the worst bordello they looked at was mainly a strip
of cheap hotel rooms in a rural Mexican town. There, hookers sold their wares
for the American equivalent of $25.
Sounds like a good deal right? That’s until you get down to
the brass tacks of it all.
See, $25 didn’t get you just anything. It got you 10
minutes, one position, no oral, no anal, and a very likely case of herpes. These
chicks worked in volume, so if you were one of their customers, there was very likely
chance you were the 20th dude they’d been with that day, leading
them to giving a halfhearted, exhausted effort…and a scorching case of syphilis.
In short, the price was low but the service was subpar and
the long term results of said service would only hurt you in the end.
Compare that to a high-end call girl.
In Thailand,
there was a high end club where a bunch of clean looking women sat in a glass
case, with prices already listed. There was no haggling. Payment at the
register bought them for the night, for an American equivalent of anywhere from
$500 to $1000.
Here’s the deal; unless you were into some real kinky shit,
that price covered everything. The girls were experienced,
charming and tested regularly for STDs. They rarely had more than 1 client a
day. They weren’t exhausted. They were enthusiastic and looked forward to
having clients.
The guys that paid those girls got a night to remember from
an experienced, enthusiastic professional, who was pretty, presentable in
public places if they wanted to go out, and wasn’t going to give them Gonorrhea.
They paid a higher price, but it paid off in dividends, as
these girls didn’t work in volume. They worked in quality. They did an excellent
job in the hopes that the client would return. Most of the men had memories to
store in their spank bank that would keep them happy for 100 lonely nights.
They pay more, but they get far more value for their dollar.
I have worked as a content manager for several clients and I
have seen consistently that quality beats quantity every time.
I used to work for an affiliate marketer who had at least 10
different websites running. In order to keep content coming in, he bought that
content from the cheapest people he could find. The articles I received for
posting were poorly worded, keyword stuffed, messes of things that were an embarrassment
to the human language.
Those articles usually managed to make it to the first page
of Google for about 6 hours before they would be plummeted to the darkest
depths of Page Rank, or banned by Google entirely.
Then, I had a higher end client who sold jewelry. When we
were hiring content writers, even for something as small as 300 word product
descriptions, she said to me “don’t focus on price. Instead, hire the best
writers who can deliver on the most consistent basis.”
As a result, her page rank is steadily climbing, even though
she doesn’t post nearly as often as my affiliate marketer. Also, her website
has never been banned and I’ve never had to use a proxy (the internets'
equivalent of a condom) to post her articles.
I get that people are busy and that they don’t have time to
write all their own articles. Believe me; I have had more than a few blogs that
I have abandoned due to lack of time. But if you’re going to hire content writers,
you’re pretty much flushing money down the toilet if you’re going to Fiverr and
buying 50 articles for $5 a piece.
Where do you think they’re getting those articles? They’re
scraping them from the internet and spinning them. You’re getting something
used, useless and completely boring that is eventually going to give you the
Google equivalent of an STD.
But when you buy quality, you buy a product that keeps on
giving.
Google has made it clear with the updates of Panda, Penguin
and now, Hummingbird, that they are done with dirty $5 whores clustering up
their front pages. They want to show of the classy pages that make them look
good. They want to show the pages that keep their clientele coming back for
more.
And they don’t want their clients to have to worry about getting
viruses after visiting those pages.
