As I wrote previously, I will be attempting to start a network of city guide sites and will be looking for people to write for me. It seems to me like there are three ways to go about getting content, each with their own advantages and disadvantages for both myself and the contributor.
The three ways to get content that I’m considering are to pay writers for their work, to offer a permanent link on each contributed article to a site of the writer’s choice, or to put the writer’s Adsense code on each page they write for me. In an effort to find some people to write for me and to get some feedback on what you think the best method would be, I’ve made a little list the with pros and cons.
Pay Writers
This would see me paying US$15 per article or area guide of around 1000 words. I’m not sure what the going rate is so don’t know if this price is too high or too low.
Pros
- Me – Once I pay the writer I will own the content and can do whatever I want with it.
- Writer – The writer sees cash up front so gets rewarded immediately for their work.
Cons
- Me – I need a lot of content and will only be able to afford to get a couple of sites done with the money I have.
- Writer – The amount paid isn’t huge and once the article is sold they won’t have any chance of earning more money from it.
Put a Link of the Writer’s Choice on Each Article
This would see me adding a link at the top of each article to a site (or even a page within a site) of the writer’s choice. The link would be at the top of the page under the article’s title and would be limited to one.
Pros
- Me – Doesn’t cost me anything so I can add as many articles as I can get written.
- Me – Takes two seconds to add a link to a page so not a lot of extra work needed by me.
- Writer – The writer can get traffic and link juice from my site for as long as the article is there.
- Writer – The site will benefit from being link to from many of my other, already established sites which would make a link from it a good thing to have.
Cons
- Me – I would have no real ownership of the content since it will only belong to my site as long as the link is there.
- Me – My site will lose link juice and possibly PR because of outbound links to other sites.
- Writer – They have no control over SEO or what else I put onto the site so they have to trust that I will look after the site.
- Writer – They probably won’t see the benefits of the link for many months.
Put the Writers Adsense Code on Each Page They Write
Add three of the writer’s Adsense units to each article they write.
Pros
- Me – Doesn’t cost me anything so I can add as many articles as I can get written.
- Writer – I know a bit about SEO so the writer will benefit from this and their articles should do pretty well in the SERPs.
- Writer – Once the article is written it can be forgotten about and still keep on earning.
Cons
- Me – Adsense is a large part of the revenue model for these sites so losing out on Adsense units isn’t ideal.
- Me – No really ownership of the content since it will only belong to my site as long as the Adsense units are there.
- Me – Adding Adsense code to each article would be a bit more time consuming than the other options.
- Me – If the writer doesn’t already have Adsense I would have to explain it to them and getting their code may be difficult.
- Me – Have t otrust that the writer won’t click on their own ads which might get my sites into trouble (not sure on this though).
- Writer – New sites will not see substantial traffic for some time so the Adsense units could take awhile to produce.
- Writer – The writer would need to set up an Adsense account if they haven’t already got one.
I would be really interested in hearing which of these options would appeal to you most. Or if you have other ideas or suggestions on how to compensate writers that would be great too. Do any of these options appeal to you? Can you think of any other pros and cons for each for both parties?
Finally… are there any people out there in internetland who would like to contribute articles or area guides for sites similar to my moving to London site? I have a list of 45 cities, mainly international (the only US cities I’m looking for would be LA and New York) so if you’ve lived in a major city worldwide and know your stuff, I’d love to hear from you!
I really think $15 is way too low. Matadornetwork for example offers at least $30 per article, with much more offered if it hits the front page of digg, Yahoo news etc. (motivation to write an excellent article instead of just fitting the description), and they also host lots of city guide articles. I’ll admit that my motivation for contributing to Matador was based much more on the great feeling of being on a popular site and of course I get spill over traffic to my blog from a link on my article, rather than on the money, which is probably only about $5 an hour considering the time I put into the video they showed… writing an article properly could take all afternoon. It’s a lot less of an earner than people’s day jobs.
Other sites pay much more. You have to consider the time taken to write the article – it isn’t worth some people’s while for that kind of money. You will certainly get offers, but they will be filtered into the low-quality spectrum IMO. If someone is living in a major city in the world they are probably paying a lot for it, so $15 is chump change. Perhaps your approach will be more successful for those travelling through cheaper countries (but if they are travelling through, they may not have an expert enough opinion).
If you really are on that tight a budget, I’d focus more on encouraging people based on links to their site (and promising that your site will be high up in Google searches) and Adsense earnings (explaining how it works, since a lot of people may not understand). It’s not really losing juice a link is opening in a new window/tab. If people go to your site to find out about a city they’ll stay there until they have their info, but out of a side-curiosity find out more about the author if they like.
It’s a fantastic business idea, but considering your long term earnings from the article I think you will have to be more generous to your contributors
Just my €0.02! 
Kirsty -
Regarding option 1. I would check Elance for standard copywriting rates, I want to say it’s anywhere from 1-5 cents a word, depending on the type of writing and quality of work expected.
Option 2 seems much more attractive however, specially if you can project some type of earnings for the writer to look at beforehand. I understand that you’re worried about losing out on Adsense revenue as the site creator, but isn’t there some way to get around that? Is rotating codes too difficult?
Also, this only applies to the Internet-tuned crowd such as myself, but what about offering marketing incentives to the writer? A blog review, a link advertisement for a few weeks, etc. Your following is big enough at this point for you to take advantage of the publicity.
Hope this helps. Cheers, from Baku, Azerbaijan!
Alan
I think the Adsense option would be attractive to most writers as there is no limit to the earning potential. Also would the articles/city guides have to be unique i.e. they could not be published anywhere else on the web? Are they directed geared towards tourists visiting a city or somebody who wants to move to and live in a city?
Thanks for the responses so far. Here’s a wee bit of clarification on a few things…
@IP I should have pointed out that for these sites I am more interested in having someone who knows their stuff than having a professional writer. I actually don’t want a polished piece, I want something written in a chatty sort of way as though they were giving advice to a friend. The area guide I wrote myself took less than an hour to get the info down and then a bit more to polish and that’s what I tell other people too… that, if they know their stuff, it shouldn’t take long to write and I will be happy to edit it. I can’t afford to pay even that much so option one isn’t really practical for me anyways. The link juice reference is more about how Google feels about outbound links rather than be being afraid that the visitor will leave the site.
@Alan I wouldn’t be interested in rotating ads because I think it’s fair to give three permanent ads as payment. I can’t get Adsense revenue from other areas of the site as well as going for link sales and affiliate sales and stuff like that. I think that’s a neat suggestion to take advantage of having a following… it’ss funny to think about that!
@travbod The articles would have to be unique but that doesn’t mean I’d object if they submitted a similar article worded differently somewhere else. They’d be geared towards people heading to the city to live and work rather than tourists. So I wouldn’t care about recommendations on cool things to see but rather knowing about how to set up a bank account, get a cell phone and what it’s like living in some outlying suberb.
Hope this clarifies things… thanks for the comments!
I’ll just add that you could also consider combining some of these ideas. $15 may not be a lot of money but add a permanent link to go with it you might see a better return. If they were buying links off you I imagine they would be be willing to cough up that much. Getting payed for someone putting a link to you on their site sounds a pretty good deal to me.
I wouldn’t think outbound links would hurt you too much with google plus if you get some good regular contributors your now going to have a new outbound link with every new item.
Good luck with it.
Paying up front for quality content is the way to go $15 is light though, I Still pay $10 per 400 words / page & find local native speakers at this rate fairly easily.
I think yoiu are missing one big thing from your analysis with a small investment from yourself lets say $100 per month over 12 months each month during those 12 months you will earn a little more from the sites allready created, by month 13 the sites you created will probably be making you $100 so months 13 thru 24 will be self financing Month 25 will see you with a net of $200 a month or you could continue reinvesting
The above is probably worst case scenario for myself I have found I can not even keep up with the writers @ $100 per month, this small monthly investment will give you as much content as you can manage.
The price tag of $15 is actually about middle of the road if you’re looking for a 400-500 word peice (which is about what you have on the other sites). It’s a lot of capital outlay, but it could definately be worth it in the long haul.
Just a note- Matador only bumped up to $30 about 2 months ago, before that they were doing $15.
If you’ve the dough, go with the paid article model. You can advertise it on Matador Bounty Board or on Craigslist easily enough. You won’t get the best of the best writers, but you’re not really looking for that. If you’re willing to spend a bit of time in editing, then you’re golden. After that you can do whatever you want with the articles (perhaps a living internationally e-book at some point?) without having to re-pay or give credit to anyone else.
Personally I’d opt for the adsense thing. But you have to see what’s convenient for you, as most writers will follow anyway. A third way is to make deals with individual writers.
If you’re looking for a Dutch writer: I’m happy to produce articles. I’ve lived a large part of my life near Amsterdam and currently study in Utrecht and live quite near the city.
If you were running a dynamic site you could offer adspace on pages written by author. In drupal it would be as simple as granting users priviledge to edit blocks that are set to only appear on pages they author.
N.b. drupal is not that simple to get started with but in the long run, especially if you are planning a lot of sites the multi-site function could save a lot of time.
I’ve lived in Reykjavik and Copenhagen so if youre doing those I’ll be glad to write up some info.
This is a joke right? You want to buy crap content to make money off of ignorant clickers who can’t find Wikitravel? Whatever pays the bills, I guess, but it’s sleazy. You can keep the lousy $15.
Do both!
I pay my travel writers a relatively small amount (US $10) up front for the article, then offer revenue sharing on the article for 6 months or 1 year. That way, I use my adsense code and own the content, but pay them 50% of that page’s earnings via PayPal.
The allure of doing this is that the writer has no earning limit, so it is appealing to them….plus it gives them motivation to help promote it themselves (ie…social bookmarking) because they have a stake in the traffic as well. In my opinion, its better to have them help promote rather than walk away with $30 in their pocket.
Best of luck,
Greg
I really think $15 is a fair price. Especially since the dollar is increasing in value and we’re now in the midst of a global recession.
$15 sounds about right – I get that for blog posts which average around 400-500 words. Travel seems to pay less than other niches (too many bloody aspiring Marco Polos LOL) so I don’t think that’s an insulting amount.
I’ve just started blogging at a new network (see link
) They pay $1 for 100 word post plus a traffic bonus. Most writers seem to be there for the money LOL – for me its worth it – but only for as long as the backlinks are do follow.
From what I see on the boards few writers understand the value of links or understand that a $1 / post is WAY more than most of their posts bring in on Adsense revenue – because of this lack of knowledge I think it would be a pain in the arse managing their Adsense codes.
Maybe pay a traffic bonus though: but then you’ d have to use statcounter or something for the stats…
Lots of ideas here that I will need to think about when I don’t feel so brain dead. I was thinking that just paying up front for the content and getting that out of the way seems smart, I just wish I had a couple thousand extra to play with! I could probably afford to churn out two or three more sites by paying people for articles but I don’t want to deplete my savings more than that since I’ll be heading to Buenos Aires and am not sure yet how pricey it is there.
I do think $15 is an ok price based on the responses I get to my ads alone. Nobody asks for more and I get a lot of responses. The work so far has been packed with good info but I’ve needed to edit it a lot in some cases. But that’s ok since I had expected that and even told the writers that.
I will keep you all updated on what I decide to do and any variations I make from paying for content up front. For now I think Ill concentrate on finishing up my Sydney and Beijing sites and then start on Buenos Aires since I’m heading there in a couple months to live.