At first glance, outsourcing articles seems an attractive idea:

• Do a bit of keyword research at somewhere like this site
• Go to a site like iWriter and pay someone else to write your conten. often quicker than you could do it yourself
• Give the article a quick once over, copy and paste it into your site and monetise it

But is that something you should do?

Unless you just use the articles as a starting point and edit them heavily, theyre unlikely to be in your own voice.

And once you have a number of articles on your site, almost certainly from a number of different writers, things become a lot less consistent.

Which may be OK or it may not.

I use outsourced articles for some niches but not for sites that I care about and want to make a decent amount of money from.

For instance, on this site, every single word is written by me.

On some of my niche sites, the money articles are written by me and the support articles which just give the site a bit more weight are outsourced.

But even then I’ll edit them before posting.

Most outsourced articles aren’t written by people who know much (if anything) about your topic.

At the cheap end of the market, they’re quickly researched (if at all) and churned out to reach the word count.

Sites like iWriter take care of most plagiarism problems – they automatically run the articles through Copyscape and they know the tricks that unscrupulous writers will use to fool that service so they trap for those as well.

Sometimes you’ll hit a gem.

Maybe it’s someone who should be in a higher priced category but hasn’t yet got the necessary score.

Or maybe you got lucky and the person writing the aricle actually knows what they’re talking about. That happens more often than you might think in certain niches (I’ve had some really well written articles on meditation and similar subjects).

Other times, the article will be a bunch of words glued together in something that passes for sentences.

You’ll know when you read one – it will be mostly padding and little, if any, usable information.

Which isn’t likely to attract people who want to pay you an affiliate commission on the products you’re linking to as they’ll expect it to be mostly good information.

Otherwise they’ll assume that the products you’re promoting are the same quality as the articles you’re hoping they’ll read.

The really scary part of this equation is that although no human at Google will read your content, the search engine has enough data to work with to also know whether or not your article was slung together by someone who knew nothing about the topic or whether it was crafted by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

That is scary!

There’s a rule in copywriting that says you should give your very best information for free in the sales letter because people will be thinking in their mind that if that’s the quality of the info they’re getting for free, the info they pay for will be even better.

The same goes for the content you write,

Once you get in the habit, articles are easy to write.

And before you get in the habit, in your mind’s eye just imagine you’re explaining the topic one-on-one to a friend and put those thoughts into your article.

Don’t get hung up on article length or keyword density or other distractions.

Just do it.

Weirdly (or not, depending on your point of view), I wrote about 225 words of this article as a reply in a forum.

I then thought that it was a good enough reply that I could expand on it here, which is what I’ve done.

That’s something that takes a bit of practice – but not much practice and you’ll get better over time.

If you’d like more encouragement, you can check this out where I show you (recorded live) how I wrote a complete article in 20 minutes and how you can do the same.

And if you’d like to profit from your articles by selling affiliate products, take a look at this free video.