I am asking people here and not at any of the many freelance writing places online, because it is an opportunity for some people to learn and advance their own websites.
Pokermonger states:
If you have an established site and can buy an article for $100, put it on your site and be listed within a short time in the top 10 for just one decent search term contained in that article, then you have made a killing. The true value of the article will be much higher than $100. If you have a new site and/or it sucks, it may not matter how good the article is, it may never rank. So there are many things to consider. Yes you can buy content for cheap, but for the most part it will not do you a tremendous amount of good. You can also buy expensive content that sucks, so you have to be careful.
Except that you are still a long way away from making a kiilling. You need hundreds of these keywords in this industry, sometimes thousands of these minor keywords to start making good money.
Articles do draw visitors, but they do not sell online gambling. That is a whole other thing, what you do with the visitor once you have them there.
Many visitors you gain through articles just want to know some detail about some game and have no interest in signing up for online gaming properties. In this case, and it is frequent, the article has next to zero value. It does help branding, if you brand your site.
Casinos don’t much pay for branding, they only pay for players. Even once you have a huge readership and casinos flock to buy space on your site, they still only pay for players, not branding.
That may be very shortsighted of them, but we still have to live with it and cannot build pure content sites and make money. We still have to sell online gaming, and we have to presell the specific properties we promote.
If casinos would see the light and pay just for branding, then info sites with lots of high quality articles would always pay off. I bet players from that type of site have much superior value. They are afficionados.
But as is, Pokermonger is exactly right, the value of an article is dictated by the site that carries it.
I have seen some decent articles for $15. I have bought decent articles for that. If you have a new site it is ok to do that, just make sure there is actual info there and not just fluff.
Stay away from so called SEO articles – usually that means keyword stuffing and that is frowned upon by the engines.
As your site grows the value of an article grows, as long as you still sell well. If you sell well, you will be able to afford better articles.
The growth occurs naturally.
Personally I prefer having a close working relationship with people who do work with me, and I like exclusivity and permanence. So I like to recruit from within the industry – affiliates and players.
If you have a different management style or don’t want permanence, you can recruit anyplace, but it still pays to have people write about stuff they are very familiar with. Finding someone like Pokermonger, who loves to write about poker and knows his stuff, is a great thing to happen.