I’m nearing the end of my first half decade of Internet marketing, and I am still struck by the importance of content on the eventual success of any Internet business. If any cliche dealing with this relatively new field is true, it is this: Content is King!

Anyone who has done much web article writing for distribution for either traffic or SEO purposes will know that it is not a simple task. Good web writers have a special skill set.

Last night I happened to find myself at one of those websites where free lancers can view project proposals from businesses and vice versa. It was not guru.com, but it was a site similar to that. I decided to look around just to see the sorts of things that were listed. I actually laughed out loud at some of the proposals, even though I was alone in my office.

One company posted a request for 300 keyword optimized articles of 500 words each. Their budget for the project was $150. I’m not math major, but I didn’t have to use my calculator to figure out that the per article payment would have been fifty cents an article. I thought that it had to be a misprint until I found another request for someone to handle a SEO link building efforts. They wanted 1100 one way, quality links from pages with page rank for the princely sum of $300. The proposal said that they had hired others for this job previously, but they had been unsuccessful in making any progress. What a surprise!

Very early in my short career, I was guilty of the same thing. I once contracted for a package of ten original optimized articles for $70. I received articles that were strikingly similar to each other. They were indeed packed with my key phrases. Indeed, they were little more than keyword spam. I tried to revise them so that they would be usable, but I finally decided that I would be better off just completely starting over.

Because of the essential nature of having quality content for our own sites and for use in our syndication efforts for traffic and search engine optimization purposes, we must be very efficient in our article marketing efforts. Few things impact our reputation more than the content we put out there with links leading back to our websites.

I wasted $70 for 10 articles and then invested a lot of time trying to rework those, albeit unsuccessfully. I would have been much better off using that money and time pay a good writer to produce two articles. My time could have been spent spinning those two into twenty or so variations for submission to article directories and distribution to other sites.

I have an acquaintance to operates a number of retail sites. He says that he learned his lesson (as it seems we all must). He has found some excellent writers. He pays $50 for each 500 word article and reports that it is money well spent. I’m absolutely sure that his business is much more profitable than the company who is offering fifty cents an article or the business that is willing to pay less than fifteen cents per “quality” link.

Try to benefit from my early mistakes. If, instead, you have to learn by making your own mistakes, I hope you only waste seventy dollars as I did. It pays to be a fast learner.