This post is not meant to be a scientific experiment, I know there are major other reasons for the two sites I mention not being equal but it does demonstrate to some extent a few of the cliches you hear a lot, if your thinking of putting up a low/zero maintenance information website you have a couple of options.

• Scrape content
• Pay a content writer
• Pay someone who really knows what they are talking about

I have never bothered with scraping content and republishing it, purely because I have always felt the short term gains are just that, I prefer something that has a better chance of lasting longer, so that leaves two other options, both of which I have done.

Pay a content writer
This is the cheaper option, you can find them in various forums and through recommendations and it certainly is the case that they vary in skill and ability, I took this option for home and office furniture. I made a list of 30 articles that were based on the main keywords for it’s genre using overture and paid around $200 for the articles as a bulk deal, put the articles up and added some adsense and a couple of small links and left it be. That was January 2006.

Since then the site has earned it’s money back generating under 10 page impressions per day. Last month in December 2007 it earned a paltry $5.27

Links: Naturally this site being of low value content has done next to nothing, Yahoo site explorer reports 20 inbound links. I have other plans for the domain now and the poor quality articles just have not worked for me, I would have to spend serious amounts of time on rankings & backlinks to get anything decent out of this site.

Pay someone who knows what they are talking about
I chose this option for another information based site on tattoos. For the site www.tattooinfo.net I sourced a tattooist from asking around on a few forums and paid not much more, about $10 per article to make 30 informative articles on again a variety of keywords/questions using overture for inspiration. Added a couple of links and left it completely alone, that was January 2005.

Since then the site has grown traffic wise to around 1400 page impressions per day, last month in December it earned around $100 in a low paying niche.

Links: Naturally this site being of high informative value content wise has done much better, Yahoo site explorer reports 176 inbound links, these links apart from a half dozen of my own have been gained naturally with no backlink campaign or work done.

Conclusion
Although these two sites are in totally different niches with one always being more linkworthy than the other it should still serve as a reminder that the old sayings like content is king are very much applicable more so today than ever they were, if you have the choice between a quick and easy solution to pay article writers for content or spending a few hours on forums sourcing someone more qualified to write for you as a one off then I suggest taking the time out to get valuable content.

Today the furniture site is stagnant with less than 50 visitors last month and I have other plans for that domain now, the tattoo info site had over 14,000 visitors last month and is an asset - the main difference between the two for myself was spending an extra 2-3 hours at the start to find someone qualified to create content that would inform and educate others.