Everyone loves a bargain. Not only that, everyone also loves a bargain when it’s combined with convenience—just like fast food. Rolling through the drive thru and ordering an item or two off the menu saves you the hassle of cooking dinner, while also keeping a few bucks in your pocket.
Who doesn’t want to save time and money?
The same concept applies for business owners looking for quick and cheap options for blogging. Sure, business blogging is generally cost effective, which is one of the reasons that it’s become such a popular content marketing method. However, sometimes you’ll see wildly fluctuating price ranges for blogs, from $5 to $500 per blog.
So, naturally, most business owners will snap up a $5 blog post from a run-of-the-mill content writing publisher, post it on their website, and call it a day. Quick and cheap blogging is always the way to go, right?
Unfortunately, this is the fast food drive thru version of business blogging—and it’s more of a blunder than a bargain.
Here’s why.
1. $5 Blog Posts Are Full of Empty Calories
Have you ever heard about fast food having empty calories? These are calories that are mainly composed of sugar and fat, yet don’t really contribute anything to your daily nutrients. Empty calories temporarily fill your stomach, only leaving you hungrier several hours later.
Sound familiar?
This is similar to the makeup of most $5 blog posts. These bargain business blog posts appear to contain a lot of words, but the problem is that those words don’t really say or mean anything at all. They’re full of fluff without any supportive or solid data. Sure, it fills your website with content, but it doesn’t really do anything for your business or the reader.
When you’re blogging for business, your blog needs to provide real quality calories—in other words, feed your audience with informative, relevant, and engaging content to keep them coming back for more.
2. $5 Blog Posts Might Have Questionable Origins
Most of us don’t like to think of where our fast food dinner really comes from. We like to believe that the ingredients are farm fresh and organic, but it’s really hard to say. It tastes good and it’s cheap, so most people will take their chances and go on with their day.
When you put in an order for a $5 blog post, you might be surprised to learn who is writing your article. Ultra cheap blog posts are often outsourced to countries where English isn’t the primary language—countries such as India or the Philippines. This isn’t to say that no one in these countries can fluently write in English, but chances are that a native English speaker won’t publish your article.
Sometimes, you can get lucky and find a talented freelancer who is just starting out and will write for $5 a post. But this is truly the luck of the draw, and most talented freelancers value their work and know their worth.
3. $5 Blog Posts Are Full of Mystery Meat
Speaking of questionable origins of fast food, how about questionable ingredients? When you order a fast food burger, fish sandwich, or even tacos, do you really know what’s in the meat? We like to believe that major fast food companies are honest about their ingredients, but in the end, we probably don’t know the whole story.
In other words, you get something that looks like chicken and tastes like chicken, but who knows if it’s real chicken.
This is the same idea of what happens when you order $5 blog posts. You place a detailed order on what you need for your blog, but you receive a mishap of a blog post that is scrambled with questionable copy. The stats and data probably aren’t verified, and the entire post is just carelessly thrown together.
The mystery part is that you get to try to unravel what message the writer is trying to convey. You’ll be responsible for fixing the errors of your writer, and you might have to discard the entire blog post all together.
Often times, the writing style of $5 blog posts are unclear, confusing, and a bit of a mystery.
4. $5 Blog Posts do Nothing For Your Brand’s Image
Let’s face it—too much fast food can contribute to your personal image in a negative way. Your jeans can become too tight and eventually you’ll be heading to the gym to reverse the damage. The good news is that you can fix your personal image from bad choices, but it’s a bit harder to undo the damage to your company that’s done by $5 blog posts.
When you decide to use $5 blog posts for your company, it’s important to understand that customers will notice. They won’t necessarily know that you paid a cheap price for the blog post, but they’ll know that the quality is terrible and it’s not helping answer any of their questions.
Unfortunately, this scenario leads to your company losing credibility and making you look like an unreliable resource. It’s difficult to build an online image or reputation on $5 blog posts, and will likely cost you both money and customers in the long run.
5. $5 Blog Posts Are Cheap For a Reason
Like $5 blog posts, fast food is cheap for a reason—it’s not meant to be used as your primary diet. The drive thru is there for when you’re in a pinch, tired of cooking all of the time, or just want to indulge a bit in something that you know isn’t so healthy for you.
$5 blog posts are cheap for several reasons, including:
- They have a very short word count
- They are written by non-native English speakers
- They are full of ‘fluff’ and lack supportive data and relevant content
- They are generated by software (humans don’t actually write them)
- They are overstuffed with keywords, which can hurt SEO efforts
- They have a quick turnaround time, which increases likelihood of careless mistakes
In all honesty, it’s hard for anyone to be motivated to write his or her best work for $5. The business owner will definitely save some cash in the process, but it really pays to invest a few more dollars and hire a writer that adds value to your blogging strategy—a value that is worth much more than $5.
$5 Works For Sub Sandwiches, Not Blog Posts
I’m guilty of spending $5 on a sub sandwich, and I’d be a hypocrite to say that I don’t eat fast food from time to time. However, I’d also never limit my budget to $5 for building my business.
Blogging for business is indeed affordable, but there’s a lot on the line if you try to cut too many corners. If you believe that your reputation and credibility is worth more than $5, you’ll skip the cheap articles and invest in high quality posts that enhance your brand.
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