Cost of Web Content and Pay for Freelance Writers

How much should we pay for content? There is quite a range out there. How much should writers get paid? In-house, outsource or partnerships? These are strategic as well as tactical questions.

For those of us who want or need to buy content, it is paid for up front, either under exclusive or non-exclusive agreements. It is also possible to find articles to purchase which are ready to go, or propose new articles and wait for writers to bid or submit writing which is then paid for.

Going Rates

The excellent Freelance Writing Gigs blog is a good resource on paid writing (from the freelance writer side) and has a recently updated (2010-01) overview of the market demand and pricing for Freelance writing. See also the Paid2Write blog which provides brief reviews of freelance writing sites.

Associated Content

Associated Content is the freelance writing opportunity most people start with. They along with Demand Studios are two of the largest freelance writing companies

Freelance Writing at Associated Content

Associated content has a few options for writers in terms of pay. One can retain the copyright and earn less, but have flexibility in republishing. Or one can assign full rights to AC and get some up-front pay as well.

One great thing about AC is that people are paid to write articles about AC. A quick search using the terms "Associate Content Paid" on AC reveals quite a few articles of interest.

Content Buying at Associated Content

AC provides a form to fill out and an email came back within 2 days with prices averaging $65 for original articles, as well as a long-term agreement with some level of volume. Simply too expensive, though apparently they do have some editorial quality control, and a large stable of freelance writers as well as the option of buying existing content.

Constant Content

Constant Content offers a writing opportunities directly and through buyer requests.

Freelance Writing at Constant Content

Writers can submit to Constant Content. In addition they have image, video, and illustrations. However, perusing some of the items is a bit disappointing as there are inflated prices and low quality.

Content Buying at Constant Content

Prices for content depend upon rights (use, unique or full rights), and article requests can have price ranges in them (along with length and content requirements).

One nice feature is the ability to see the author profiles, writing and sales volume and contact them directly. Also one can make offers to bid on content which authors have enabled for bidding as opposed to fixed prices.

Demand Media and Demand Studios

Demand Media is the parent company of Demand Studios, which is the writer-facing part of the organization.

Freelance Writing at Demand Studios

Through Demand Studios, writers can apply for and secure writing assignments and get paid directly and/or over time for content. They pay twice a week and they appear to be hiring writers, copy editors and filmmakers. Demand owns the copyright on the material paid for.

Content Buying at Demand Studios

Sadly, the only information on buying content is an online email address which we have yet to hear a reply from. We sent an email a few weeks ago.

Elance

Elance is not a content provider per se, but does have a large number of freelance writers. $10 USD / hr is a popular minimum rate and they have individuals and teams for hire.

Helium

Helium unfortunately was down at the time of publication, but they'll likely be back soon. I have some old links so those will go in the description below.

Freelance Writing at Helium

Helium has some advantages and disadvantages when compared with Associated Content. There may be more freedom with Helium in terms of editorial review.

Content Buying at Helium

Helium has a marketplace that makes it easy to post writing opportunities. However, it did look a little sparse in the market, though prices were not bad (for the content buyer) in terms of writing offers.

HubPages and Bright Hub

HubPages and Bright Hub have many similarities beyond the "Hub" component in their names. Both provide tools to create pages and groups of pages, add images, social bookmarks, etc.

Freelance Writing at HubPages and Bright Hub

HubPages allows for affiliate access to Amazon, Adsense, etc. and gets a percentage of views for their own Amazon, Adsense links, etc.

Bright Hub also pays directly for content, as well as supporting own-content creation under a community or as an individual.

• Bright Hub writing opportunities
• Hub Pages freelance writing overview

Content Buying at HubPages and Bright Hub

There does not appear to be any content buying opportunities at HubPages or Bright Hub at the present time. They are both destination sites, but it is possible they would put content up for sale or give access to writers in the future.

Travelfish Travel Writing

TravelFish is an up-and-coming Southeast Asia independent travel guide which focuses on ebooks and now has an iPhone application.

Freelance Writing at Travelfish

Travelfish Jobs actually pay well for writing, but the research time and costs can be considerable. As with most things, success lies in organization.

Content Buying at Travelfish

There does not appear to be any content buying opportunities at TravelFish at the present time.

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Markdown WordPress Plugin

Markdown is a fantastic tool for providing document markup that is then transformed into HTML. Storage space is reduced from storing HTML, therefore queries to retrieve are reduced, and most importantly readability is increased.

The Markdown WordPress plugin (v.1.2.2 in any case) works great though in our current template we have trouble with it executing from within certain blocks such as inside of tables, widgets and in shortcode-supported footers.

As stated, Markdown does require learning (and remembering), that is recognition vs. recall. However, once learned the use of Markdown in offline documents (such as email) can be an even better markup than either something made up, or the requirement to use a rich text editor. WordPerfect 5.1 still beats MS Word, in our humble, old-school opinion.

Flickr Gallery WordPress Plugin

The use of shortcodes in general, such as those produced by Flickr Gallery require some initial configuration and there is a learning curve, however they dramatically simplify text editing.

Lightbox 2 WordPress Plugin

Flickr Gallery supports various lightbox plugins. Currently we prefer the excellent Lightbox2.

Smart YouTube WordPress Plugin

Smart YouTube by Vladimir Prevolac is another goodie which has some great advantages over copying-and-pasting embed code.

SlideShare WordPress Plugin

Yoast's Slideshare plugin (one of the few of his that works on a symlinked /plugins/ installation) allows for setting an override width and use the wordpress.com SlideShare shortcode. Worthwhile to use.

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Links to Images

Studies show that people don't usually expect to find a photo or image at the end of a text link that does not refer to the link as having an image. There are a few ways (options) to handle this.

• Have a link that says: "(photo)" or "(image)" after a given description text, and link the text to the image. The disadvantage here is the anchor text becomes very generic, if it is to one of your own images in, say, Flickr.
• Have one or more thumbnails to Flickr images, using the Flickr Gallery tag, which is easily managed (add or remove images by adding/removing tags to images in Flickr). This is great for usability, and the Title can be preserved within the IMG tag.
• Have a small or medium-sized image on the page near the text (no link or link the image out to a larger image). Again, Title can be preserved and a link out to the full sized image (lightbox enabled) is possible.

Links to Content

Links are good on pages, but a small number of them are best both for user navigation of a site and for "PageRank Sculpting" tactics. Links perform several functions at the same time (for both the human and search engine). Here are some guidelines for any content creator and certain for all the bloggers and blogs/news feeds for all sites.

Page-Sized Only

Link only to content that is page-sized, and be sure to use that pages' name or something close to it. Avoid linking to sub-content within a page (e.g., Aftercare). If something is important enough, it should have its' own page, if it doesn't then it shouldn't have it's own link. This is a guideline that others may disagree with, and certainly sub-page content linking is still somewhat prevalent on the web. A better approach is a search-aware results page which highlights search terms. We feel that search is a better tool than subsection linking.

Anchor Text Length

The anchor text of a link should not be very long, from 1-5 words or so, 6-7 if you must, but must include keywords, preferably keywords to the page but also keywords to the site.

Outbound Links Important

It is just as important to link out with a few judicious links as to link within the site. Having a "Links" page is not the same thing and Google rather evaluates each individual page of a site and if all links are on a links page that page will have low value and the other pages will have no outbound links. If you can consider outbound links to things like Wikipedia pages or other forms of reference that are well known or popular (according to Google) that helps a lot.

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Cool bro. Nice Chiang Mai, Thailand to Vientiane Laos Visa Run posting. I'm going to give you some SEO for on-page content advice. This is a part of what I do for my consulting these days:

Blog Post Length and Images

For blog posts you want 200-300 words and at least one image in the post (better to have 2-3). In addition, the images should have a title="Image title with keywords" in them. A great place to find images you can use is Flickr. The Flickr advanced search for CC-BY Creative Commons' licensed works will show images that the owners have made publicly available for any use (including selling or modifying their work).

You want to have a good (but not too long) Title for each post. Travel is too brief a title, think "Thailand, Laos Travel" or "Chiang Mai, Thailand to Vientiane Laos Visa Run", even better.

Use of Tags and Categories

It is good to use tags and categories, or at least categories for blogging. This helps with people who want to browse a site but also search engine results page ranking can be higher for category pages than for individual posts or a given blog for a specific topic.

Optimize Blog Post URLs

It is also good to have optimized URLs for each post (short with hyphens between words, again using keywords). For example /thailand-islands-chiang-mai-travel/ is a good url for your post.

Subheads with Keywords

Also you want subheads (use < h2 >Subhead< /h2 > to make the subheading). These subheads should be 1-5 words or so and make sure you use a keyword or two that your post is about. Have a few subheads. It is good to have a subhead every two or so paragraphs.

Link-love, Outbound Links

Also, link out to things. Linking to Wikipedia articles is good, as Google considers them relevant. Several links per post is a good target, but longer posts can have even more links (again, to good sites). Then Google is pretty sure you are a good source and will send more search traffic your way.

Blogging, Blogging, Blogging

There are other optimizations for SEO on-page but the biggest one is to have content, content, content, which means to write quite regularly.

These things are what Google considers worthy. This is how you get traffic from search engines.

Cheers and happy blogging!

P.S., check out this great recent article on blogging as exercise for the brain. The author used to run R&D for IBM, very insightful.

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