The Philoscribe Blog

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The word on the street is that article marketing is the way to gain organic listings in the search engines thereby increasing traffic numbers to your websites.

That’s the good news. But, what are the disadvantages to embarking on an article marketing campaign?

Well, first and most obviously, the articles need to be written. Either you or someone else will need writing skills in order to produce the materials. Most people are more than capable of writing an article, they simply lack confidence or time.

For those who wish to outsource this fundamental skill, hiring a ghostwriter is a possibility but this involves a cost and you may want to weight up the pros and cons of spending your funds on a Pay Per Click advertising campaign instead.

It is important that you choose the right ghost writer for the job. Don’t be tempted to base your decision on cost alone as that can prove to be false economy.

Once you have your articles written you will need to do something with them and this is the second drawback to article marketing campaigns.

Your articles will need to be posted to your own sites in addition to article directories. For the best results each article needs to be individual meaning that each article needs to be revised multiple times to produce multiple unique pieces of work.

There are pieces of software available that can automate this task for you but many of the best article directories ban automated aubmissions.

Of course, article submission is another task that can be outsourced, although there is an associated cost, as you might expect.

I believe article marketing is a viable way of building an organic traffic stream to your web site. Of course, whether that traffic then enters into a commercial transaction with you will depend on the copy on your site and your offer.

However, unless you have the time and skills to write and submit your own articles, article marketing as a process has a cost and only you can weigh up whether it is better to use your budget for this purpose or whether to go down the pay-per-click advertising route.

There are times when, even if you can write, it is not good use of your time and you look for one or more ghostwriters to provide your articles. If you require a large number of articles in a short period of time hiring a ghostwriter (or two) may be the only way of keeping to your deadline.

Whatever your reason for outsourcing, the hardest part comes when you try to find a good, affordable ghost writer.

There are a number of freelance ‘matching’ sites which allow you to post details of your job to attract bids from writers. www.elance.com, www.rentacoder.com and www.ifreelance.com are examples of such sites. But, just because you attract bids from writers does not mean you will find a writer capable of producing good quality articles.

In my humble opinion, one of the major problems you will almost certainly encounter at these sites is caused by nothing more than greed. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh.

Purchaser’s of services are attracted by the painfully low rates offered by writers living in non-English speaking Countries. It seems that the price is more important than the quality. Because the writers do not speak or write English to a high standard, the articles are of extremely poor quality.

You only have to spend a short amount of time surfing the web before you discover sites populated by such articles.

The writer may be intelligent, articulate and able to produce a high quality article in their own language but they simply do not know enough English to provide the content you need.

Unfortunately, because of the low rates demanded by purchasers, plagiarism is often another problem you will find at these sites. There is no excuse for it, but you have to think it through. A 500 word article, properly researched, checked and edited will take between 30 and 40 minutes to produce. (A professional writer producing material on a subject with which he or she is familiar may take less time). If you are only seeking to pay $3 per article, this is an hourly rate of between $4.50 and $6. I cannot condone plagiarism but I can understand the temptation for that rate of pay.

To protect yourself, if you purchase articles from a writer at a freelance site, run the finished work through the facility at www.copyscape.com to make sure the work is original - my advice would also be to advise the writer, at the commencement of the project that this is your intention.

If you are going to make regular use of a ghostwriter look for one whom you can use exclusively for all of your writing needs. Yes, most of these writers are more expensive, but you will save time and money in the long term as you will find yourself taking delivery of good articles at a reasonable price.

When setting up a project with a ghostwriter be absolutely clear about your requirements. Be sure that you communicate, in detail, your needs and expectations. Be prepared to provide the ghostwriter with a list of keywords, topics or titles for the articles; be clear about word count and the purpose for which the articles are required. This amount of detail allows the writer to fully understand your project and to provide exactly what you are looking for.

A professional writer will give you a delivery date for your articles - and stick to it. The time to delivery will depend upon how many articles you need, how much research the writer must do and how many other projects are in the writer’s diary before yours.

Be prepared to make some payment up front, especially if this is your first ghostwriting project with a particular writer - but think carefully before paying the full amount. It’s important that both parties to the transaction are comfortable and have some protection. The benefit of finding a ghostwriter and establishing a long term relationship with them is that once that working relationship is established they will usually allow you to pay upon completion.

Outsourcing your article writing tasks to a ghostwriter will undoubtedly save you time provided you pick your ghostwriter carefully and are prepared to pay realistic rates. If you outsource to the cheapest price point you may well find the exercise costing you a whole lot more in time and money to bring the articles up to an acceptable standard.