If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that over the last several weeks I have been mentioning some interactions with virtual assistants and outsourced workers of different types.
This post will serve as an update of sorts. The observations of my initial low budget content creation experiment.
Ok, so I needed content. I didn’t want to write it, and I didn’t want to pay much money for it. I figured it would be a great situation to try something out. I’ll admit that I went into this with pretty low expectations. I thought it would be a cool learning experience, though.
I’m building a few niche websites that will hopefully bring in some affiliate income in the future. These sites are not my main business(es), just something that will eventually make me a few hundred extra dollars each month. I’ll go through what I did.
1. I went to GetAFreelancer.com and posted two jobs. The first one was to write 10 articles on a specific topic that were 400-500 words in length. The second was to create “spin” ready articles that I can distribute to article directories for link building and traffic generation purposes.
I offered $3.00 per 400-500 word article written. It’s a pretty low payment amount, but there were a lot of open jobs on the site offering that amount of money or even less per article, so I thought I’d try it out.
For the article spinning job, I offered to pay $4.00 per article for one article with ongoing work if it was done well. This was quite a bit more than most employers offer on the site I used, and it was apparent when I got a ton of bids on the project. I did this because you need to have a pretty good command of the English language to do this type of work correctly. As for creating spin ready articles, here’s an example. A sentence is taken such as…
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
And turned into…
The [quick|fast|speedy] brown fox [jumped|leapt|bounded] over the [lazy|unenergetic|sluggish] dog.
When that is put into an article spinning program it spits out different variations of the sentence, and thus makes a fairly unique article. Unique enough that article directories will accept them.
2. I picked the best candidate for each job from their bid and sample work sent.
It actually seemed pretty easy to pick out the most qualified workers. I based my decision on a few things:
- The sample work they sent to me
- The feedback of other employers
- Their bid price (it had to fit what I offered)
- Whether or not their response to me was written in gramatically correct English (got some pretty weird responses)
I then sent out an email to the winning bidders for each job explaining to them what to do. I tried to be as specific as possible, and all went well in this process.
3. I waited for the work to be completed. This part was easy. I got the work back from my workers very promptly, perhaps too promptly, and started evaluating. What I saw was interesting for sure.
I want to share some of my biggest observations from this low budget content creation experiment:
When it comes to content, you get what you pay for. There’s a reason why most writers charge $8.00-$10.00 a piece for the type of articles I was seeking. The material that I got back from this $3.00 per article person was not good. The grammar was bad and many sentences made no sense at all. I could maybe post it on a site and draw in some search engine traffic, but I’m not going to. I feel like it’s important to publish good content that will at least engage visitors a little bit. The last thing I want to do is put them off and cause them to leave the site quickly.
Don’t put too much stock in sample work that assistants send you. I don’t even think that the workers I hired created their sample work. The difference between it and the finished product I saw was dramatic.
Maybe low budget outsourcing would be better for tasks that don’t require great writing skills. A big thing I took out of this was that these people could have easily done tasks for me that didn’t involve writing. Tasks like submitting articles or answering client help emails with given template responses. I know this because as bad as they were at writing, they were great at following my directions (emailing me with specific subject lines, etc.) and were very prompt in their work.
I have a long way to go. I think this was a great way to get my feet wet in the world of outsourcing. For about $35.00 I learned some lessons that will help me far into the future. You might be thinking, “Well obviously cheap content will be crappy and people will have amazing looking sample work, idiot,” and you are probably right. But I’m not the type of person to believe something until I try it.
Anyway, there will definitely be more experiences to come and I’m looking forward to sharing them here. I hope that this little experiment post has been interesting for you to read.
Just a quick side note: In the spirit of the Holidays I thought I’d tell you guys and gals that you kick ass and I’m thankful for every one of you.
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{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Nate – thanks for sharing this. Who cares if it didn’t turn out, right? The point is, this is a learning process and you actually went out there and took action, so now you know how to do it better next time and what to expect. I appreciate you sharing this as I’ve dabbled in some affiliate stuff and might look into doing what you talk about in this post.
Wow interesting experiment.
It boggles my mind this new economy that is floating about in cyberspace. Now even more so.
Off to ponder. :)
I have learned similar lessons while outsourcing for design, development and writing. In my experience only about 5 percent of the outsourcers you hire are worth keeping. It really is a numbers game. When you find someone good, pay them well and keep them happy.
In terms of pricing, I always eliminate the lowest and highest bids immediately. High prices are not indicative of quality. The people who understand the price the market will bear generally have the most skills.
You gave it a go, thats what counts.
I highly recommend elance for web design as I had an entire custom built ecommence built for little money and it is awesome.
@ Nate – That’s what I’m thinking, who really cares right? Glad you got some useful info out of the post, that’s what I like to hear!
@ Andy – It really is amazing, I agree.
@ John – Thanks for sharing those great tips! I can definitely appreciate the part about eliminating lowest and highest bidders, seems like a great strategy.
@ Jonny – Thanks for the advice. Elance seems to be the way to go for all things web design. I will definitely keep that in mind.
Hope everything is well with all of you!
Hey Nate!
Interesting to read! Thanks for sharing your experience. I have an affiliate site I’m building up, and might indeed hire someone to write me 10 unique articles for $50 or so. I am trying to write a few articles a week for my site, and I get it done but it’s not one of my favorite things to do. My goal is to get at least 50 articles out there linking back to my affiliate site with the proper anchor text to get some rankings :)
Good luck and carry on working hard!
@ Diggy – It sounds like you have a good plan. I only paid $30 for 10 articles and they were not great, but maybe for $50 you could see better results. And I hate writing too, it just has to be done by me for the time being I guess. I’m thinking of getting a voice to type software so I can just speak the articles and increase the speed of the writing process. Who knows?! Good luck and keep working hard, it’s good to know other people out there are doing the same thing I am.
I think the contents of your articles are the hart of the blog, people follow you because they like what you have to say.
Buying a cheap articles will just ruin your reputation.
I like what you said about giving them tasks like submitting articles or answering clients emails with given template responses, that could be a cheap solution.
@ ATravel – I agree that good content is key. Although these websites would not be blogs, I still do care. Thanks for the comment.
You definitely get what you pay for. I’ve had people write for me and you can tell that the person does not speak English as a first language. This person/group was in India. All the spelling was right but horrendous grammar.
After asking twice and then not getting much improvement, I just paid them off and learned my lesson. I try to read the feedback for that particular freelancer but I think sometimes they are faking that too!
Voice to type idea sounds like a good one.
In another life, I was once contacted by a guy who needed a writer to do just that…but I couldn’t justify taking so much time writing for the little amount that was being paid…esp not when I was in the states and the cost of living was so high. So it probably is often the case that those willing to write for lesser amts of money are probably in places where they can afford to do so. Ah, the complications! But awesome you’re experimenting and gaining more and more knowledge. Eventually it’ll all come together.
@ Brian – I noticed the same thing, the spelling was great but the grammar was bad. Interesting. Thanks for the comment! Good to see you around here, and your new product looks awesome, by the way. Well done.
@ Ash – Yes, complications are abundant! I would love to hire U.S. based writers, but it’s just out of my price range right now. Thanks! Hope everything is good with you.
Up until now I can’t imagine the idea of outsourcing articles. But when the time I understand, I will remember this observation you have shared. :-)