Over the years we have written hundreds of articles for our affiliate websites…actually it might be closer to thousands. It has become second nature for us to be able to put together 500 words and more on a topic even if we know nothing about it initially. Having said that however, it still takes time to research and write and it is time we would rather spend elsewhere. So we have learnt to outsource a large part of our content to writers. This not only frees us up to get on with some of the more important aspects of our affiliate business but also means that we have fresh content from writers with different views and writing styles to ours.

There are a number of ways to get content for your site – some you will need to pay for and others you can get for free.

Paid Methods

Elance and RentaCoder are two places where you find hundreds of writers ready to write articles for you. An article can cost anywhere from $2 and up depending on how many words you want written. You just place a project with the topics and number of words you want written and writers in Elance or Rentacoder will place their bid for the project. The bid is the price they want to receive from you for writing the articles.

You will usually get more than one writer placing a bid. I receive anywhere from 5 to 20 different bids for article projects I post in Elance.

Don’t just choose the writer with the lowest bid as you get what you pay for. You will often get writers from non-English speaking countries and although in some cases they will do a great job, in others you will find that their English is not that great and you will have a lot of editing to do. We tend to stick with native English speaking writers and we always ensure that we have checked previous feedback and examples of similar work they have done before accepting a potential writer.

It is worth paying a bit extra for a writer with good feedback and good writing skills as it will save you time in editing and fixing up errors. Our favorite writer’s work is so good and she knows what our requirements are, so that oftentimes I don’t even have to read the article properly before uploading to a website. She isn’t the cheapest but she certainly isn’t the dearest either and I know that I don’t have to do any work once she sends the article through – it is ready to go.

You can be very specific with your article requests or just provide the keyword and let them go for it. We have a writer who only requires a keyword and can write a brilliant article around that. Others need more help so be as specific as you can.

Every now and then we will select more than one writer for the project so that we get two different versions of the same article. We can then add one article to our website and perhaps distribute the other article to another website or submit it to an article directory.

Here is an example of a project we might post in Elance:

We require 10 articles at 300+ words on the topic of dog training. We would like the articles to be informative and provide value to the reader. Articles must be provided in Microsoft Word or Notepad format and must be completely original. We will be checking each article for duplicate content.

Here are the topic titles:

1. How to train your dog to sit
2. How to make dog treats
3. How to get my dog to shake hands
4. etc, etc.

That’s pretty much it really. Now you can provide more detail if you require specific information in the article but so far we have found that most good writers can just take a topic and run with it.

Free Methods

Here are a few ways you can get free articles:

1. Grab some from an article directory – This isn’t the best method in the world as although you might find a fantastic article that you can add to your website or blog, so have a hundred other people. So what happens is that the same article is plastered on numerous websites. Google doesn’t like duplicate content so you will probably find that although that page of content may get indexed in Google it is nowhere to be seen in the rankings and you never get any traffic to it. So it is kind of a waste of time if you are trying to generate traffic but it can be worthwhile if it is an article that will be useful to your current readers.

2. Exchange articles with another web master - Find other websites with similar content to yours and email them to see if they would like to exchange articles.

3. Add a bit of text to a prominent spot on your website or blog saying that you accept guest writers. In exchange for an article you can add a link to the writers website at the end of the article.

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