Sitepoint marketplace offers a good bang for your buck

I almost felt apprehensive posting to ask for writers on Sitepoint, if you have ever done the same on somewhere like digitalpoint you’ll be well aware of the masses of poor quality applicants you can receive, so sometimes posting a wanted add feels like a ticket to getting spammed.

It mirrors making a post on a domain forum saying you want to buy premium domains and you have a budget of 4 figures, your guaranteed to get many many replies of which the high 90 percent will be utterly worthless junk.

Still, I had previously loaded credits into Sitepoints marketplace and had the 10 credits needed to place a wanted advert so wanted to test that route before looking at other options like job boards, 1 credit = $1 so it’s a $10 cost. I made a short specific post as I wanted a couple of gamers to post on games in the coming months, an area of the web that shows no signs of slowing down and one I want to touch on for my new domain PCs

From reading Al’s posts on blogging it seems wise to admit that any long term sustainable growth is going to be down to finding a good team of writers that can add content letting me concentrate on other aspects of the site, so it’s time to start finding writers and even if that means one good one from 5 or 6 applicants then it’s worth it.

To my surprise the replies by email and PM were pretty good quality, not masses but good leads, I explained that I am looking to pay $8 per post and looking for 3 posts per week, it’s virginal territory for me so I intend to take on a few and see which one’s are better and possibly lose a few, so far I have agreed to 4 new writers who will cover both hardware and software for me and have supplied example posts. Ideally I may look for specialists on each subject but for a start and to get some traction I think Sitepoint offered good value for money and decent exposure.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Let us know how it goes Scott. I’ve been hiring writers on Elance for almost a year now and I’ve found that you should always have at least one or two writers more than you need. Life happens to writers as well which can leave you in a situation where you don’t have any content and finding new good writers do take time.

    Another thing that I would like to mention is that I’ve found that a lot of “Prof. writers” are charging $8-$15 (or more) per article but are really just outsourcing the job to someone in India and then making the profit from almost no work.

    The point is that you can’t always trust the people you’re dealing with. Not even the professionals.

    Mikael’s last blog post..How to Locate Different IP Classes

  2. Writing the content is the most important and most time consuming part of running a website so it makes sense to hire writers. I’ve never hired writers before as I think it would be difficult to find a good one for my niche (loft conversions).

    The rates you are paying seem quite low to me, it will be interesting to see what the quality is like. What part of the world are your writers from? I’ve seen content that has been written by people with English as a second language and the sentance structure and grammer can sometime be way off.

    • Says the person who can’t spell “sentence” or “grammar” 😉

      Outsourcing anything is not an easy job. There are so few quality workers out there who’ll do a good job - you end up spending a lot of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

      I’ve never tried using Sitepoint to get writers - I’ll give that a go.

  3. Top writers for the top 20 top tier tech bloggers get around $10 to $25 per post from what I have read so it seems like a good middle ground to me, I am using all native English speakers.

  4. Scott, I’ve had a some success with ScriptLance.com. About $5 if you accept a bid from someone. And you get to see their feedback, etc. Worth considering too.

    Daniel Harrison’s last blog post..What does the Credit Crunch mean to Businesses?

  5. indeed. i’ve heard of people over here signing up for gigs like that. thankfully, for the most part, people here are quite fluent in english (former american colony and all).

    good luck with those posts. i hope they churn out high quality stuff.

    kouji’s last blog post..guantanamo haiku poem

  6. I think my logic is I’d prefer not to advertise specifically on blogger wanted boards and prefer to have the possibility of ‘catching’ the attention of people who are interesting in the subject matter first, I think that was achieved to some extent judging by the replies, although one of them is a bit tight for time as he spends 9 hours per day playing games 😉 nice work if you can get it.

  7. Have you tried getafreelancer ?
    I got some very good articles written there.

    Deano’s last blog post..A bridge too far

  8. Having recently taken on someone to do a months worth of posts at a similar price range I will be interested to hear your results also, I noticed that quite understandably because we had a agreed a “minimum” number of words every post was that length and within a few days he had become very standardised in post layouts etc. Wondering if you are noticing the same and or how you plan to avoid my fate.

    • I’ll let you know how I fare Tim, I stipulated minimum 250 words excluding any quotes.

      • I did like wise 250 words but I think in future I will either up the word count or pay a little more and get a bit more flexibility if you take your own post its around the 350 mark and I think its a nice balanced post in terms of content to size ratio 250 every single post tends to mean if nothing else by the time your site is developed that the template is nearing the same level of content as your posts!

        Tim Nash’s last blog post..Want advice on StumbleUpon?

  9. I’ve always wanted to start a site like this, recruiting writers for my site, paying out and ensuring quality content is received. Furthermore, I have domains lying around and unused! How inefficient I am. This can probably provide me a good place to find some writers. I don’t mind paying, but hopefully that the content is good.

    Keith’s last blog post..Cool Baby Smiles - Just for Laughter - October 2008 Issue 02

  10. I’ve actually had a really strange experience with their market place.

    I posted a want ad for a Magento developer or team to do an implementation. I got nothing, except a few people replying with links on an installation guide. I ended up googling and finding an offshore company that does it.

    However, like 3 months later, after the work was already done, I started getting replies again, this time actual programmers offering to do the work.

    I don’t get it.

    Justin Cook’s last blog post..What to do when you’re dropped from Google’s index

  11. I’m my experience finding writers is a tough job, being a decent writer myself I have experienced the standardised thing also. I often find I end up editing work. I sourced a writer from a competitors website but he recently just decided he couldn’t write for me any longer so I am taking a different approach at the moment. The advice about taking on more than 1 writer is definitely to be heeded!
    I also think the best interview is find a story and write 300 (250 tends to end up just that little bit too short) for me on it and see what you get back. Odesk looks like another option to try because they have a full resume and also people per hour is a uk based site I’ve looked at.

  12. I have tried DP for writers recently and actually managed to find some half decent indian guys. They are writing descriptions on UK websites for me and while I’ll have to spend about 5 mins changing/fixing each aricle the fact that they do the groundwork for me - visiting the site and doing a half decent decripive post is invaluable to me time wise.

    I wouldnt use them for real informative stuff like your PC site needs but to just bulk up a website in googles eyes they can be quite cost effective.

    • One of the best writers I have used came from a DP post which I decided was worth a gamble, he is based in Scotland and we have been using him for rewrites mainly but his general copy was of a really high standard I was surprised. Moral even DP you can find a gem if your willing to look for it.

  13. Sitepoint has some good sites for sale every now and then. I saw a PR9 directory go up for sale and somebody bought it that day for the asking price of $300,000. The seller was surprised he sold it so quickly then raised the price to $450,000 and nobody bought it. It got greedy.

  14. Yes.. Sitepoint forum is better than most of the crowded ones. One of the blogs on wordpress themes got sold in just 1 day.

  15. Very interesting. Where would you guys go to find freelance SEOs? I’m looking to subcontract basic stuff like directory submission, but want it done properly (not 5,000 submissions for 50p!)

    Cheers, Jon

    Jon’s last blog post..Salon Websites - HourTown online scheduling software

  16. Hi Scott,

    Know I’m a bit late with this comment, but this post really caught my attention. Can I ask, with a new site, how long would you generally keep employing bloggers to post content? Do you always see it being 4 bloggers giving you 3 posts per week or will this be scaled down. How long before you think you will see a return on your $100 spend per week on content?

    Looking to hire bloggers myself, but wondering how much content is enough to get the visitors in and the affiliate sales rolling 🙂

    • It’s my first time seriously blogging so perhaps Al would be better placed to answer that question Adrian. I’d expect to keep them on continuously as they are to the point that the site gets traffic in the 4 figures daily but with the same expenditure thus enabling me to break even and make a profit.

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